Degrees of reality
Quoting Wayfarer
Let's have a thread about it!
In the quote you provide, what are the modes referred to?
I assume I get to be a substance in some sense, that I am not less real than my mother was because my existence is dependent on her having existed.
So what's it all about? What sorts of things should we think are more or less real than other things?
modern philosophy and culture has no concept of there being [I]degrees[/I] of reality, which was still visible in the 17th century philosophy of Liebniz, Descartes and Spinoza:
In contrast to contemporary philosophers, most 17th century philosophers held that reality comes in degreesthat some things that exist are more or less real than other things that exist. At least part of what dictates a beings reality, according to these philosophers, is the extent to which its existence is dependent on other things: the less dependent a thing is on other things for its existence, the more real it is. Given that there are only substances ('substantia', ouisia) and modes, and that modes depend on substances for their existence, it follows that substances are the most real constituents of reality.
17th Century Theories of Substance
I interpret this as a reference to the dying embers of the 'Great Chain of Being', which was to be extinguished by the scientific revolution. Whereas for modern culture, with its nominalist roots, existence is univocal: something either exists, or it does not.
Let's have a thread about it!
In the quote you provide, what are the modes referred to?
I assume I get to be a substance in some sense, that I am not less real than my mother was because my existence is dependent on her having existed.
So what's it all about? What sorts of things should we think are more or less real than other things?
Comments (189)
I'll note that I'm inclined to not grant degrees to reality, so I suppose I fit the mold.
But in trying to think of ways to make sense of it....
When I dream of something that's happened before while the dream is real it makes sense to me to say that it's less real than the event I experienced. And the memory of the event could likewise be thought of as less real.
But then, just to head off notions of minds being less real, in this same way I'd say that the answer to a complicated mathematical expression that I'm seeking is more real than my belief when I've made a mistake -- so there could be something to be said for Universals being more real than my opinion, too.
The source of the quote is 17th Century Theories of Substance in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Substance
My understanding is that the term 'substance' in philosophy can be quite problematical. The above article starts with:
So, the history of that term, in brief, is that 'substantia' was used to translate Aristotle's 'ousia', from the Greek verb 'to be'. There are entries in SEP and IEP about the term under various headings (for example The Meaning of Being in Plato.)
In the Wikipedia entry on ouisia, I note that 'Heidegger said that the original meaning of the word 'ousia' was lost in its translation to the Latin, and, subsequently, in its translation to modern languages. For him, ousia means Being, not substance, that is, not some thing or some being that "stood" (-stance) "under" (sub-).'
Note for illustrative purposes, that if one simply substituted 'subject' for 'substance' in relation to, say, Spinoza's philosophy, that it carries a very different connotation: "the world comprises a single subject' has a very different sense to 'the world comprises a single substance'. It's not entirely accurate, of course, but it reflects Heidegger's point, which is that substances are somehow, 'beings', not objectively-existent things or kinds of stuff.
Which, in turn, has considerable significance for consideration of the sense in which 'substances' (or is that 'subjects'?) can be understood as constitutive elements of reality. I think, for us, it is almost unavoidable to conceive of such purported constituents as being objectively real in the same sense as the putative objects of physics, but in pre-modern philosophy the meaning is much nearer to 'soul' or psyche.
Hierarchical ontology
In any case, as mentioned, this idea of 'substance as being' is related to the archaic idea of the 'great chain of Being'. The Great Chain of Being is a hierarchical framework originating in classical and medieval thought that envisions the universe as a structured, interconnected whole - the literal meaning of Cosmos - with all beings and entities ranked according to their degree of perfection or closeness to the Divine Intellect. At the top is God, the ultimate source of all existence, followed by angels, humans, animals, plants, and inanimate matter, each occupying a specific place in the cosmic order. This concept, influenced by Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy and later integrated into Christian theology, reflects a worldview in which every entity has a purpose and position within a divinely ordained system. The chain emphasizes continuity and gradation, with no gaps between levels, symbolizing unity and harmony in creation. This is exhaustively described in Alexander Koyré's writings, particularly From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe.
I'm in no way suggesting any kind of 'return' to that pre-modern conception, but I think it's important background in understanding the radical difference that came about through the scientific revolution.
Why I brought it up in the first place, is because the role of there being 'degrees of reality' as providing a qualitative axis, an axis against which terms such as 'higher knowledge' is meaningful. I fully understand this triggers a lot of pushback, as I think it's probably quite inimical to liberalism in some respects (hence the frequent association of traditionalism in philosophy with reactionary politics.) But again, something to reflect on.
Now, having opened this exceedingly large can of worms, I'm going to be scarce for a couple of days, due to familial obligations. But I hope that provides grist to the mill.
I wonder which respects. I'm assuming you mean "liberalism" as a political philosophy, not the conventional, rather crude binary of liberal vs. conservative. I'm trying to picture what John Rawls might object to about a "qualitative axis" . . . The point of classical liberalism is that we allow, politically, for differences of opinion about this; we don't say that no opinion is or can be correct.
Quoting Wayfarer
Your worms are good grist! (Mixed Metaphor of the Week Award goes to Wayfarer . . . :wink: )
Degrees also seem like a quantitative concept - as if one thing can exist more than another, or exist harder in a given way. As opposed to a qualitative one - like an idea might exist in a different sense to a cup. The former corresponds to changes in degree of reality within a type, the latter corresponds to differences type. Compare heights and masses, two different quantitative axes, differences of degree. Ideality and materiality, two different seemingly binary properties, differences in kind.
What can you accomplish with different degrees of reality that you can't accomplish with a predicate with an intensity eg "Sally is 1m tall", or alternatively a standard predicate label, say "Sally is tall"? Open question.
Not that aspect, more that the individual as the arbiter of value, and that all individuals are equal in principle. Within an heirarchical ontology, there are also degrees of understanding, where individuals might have greater or lesser insight. I had a rather terse exchange about that in your other thread from which this one was spawned (here). That said, I hasten to add that I support the aspect of liberalism as the ability to accomodate a diversity of opinions, but not necessarily that it means that every opinion is equal, just because someone holds it.
I'm also bearing in mind that many of the advocates of the perennial philosophy and 'traditionalism' (René Guenon and others of that ilk) were often associated with reactionary politics (Julius Evola being a prime example.) Mark Sedgewick's book on them is called Against All Modernity.
I think there must be an inevitable degree of friction, if not conflict.
Quoting fdrake
Say as a crude example, that a delusional subject has an inadequate grip on reality. There are of course degrees, ranging from severe mental illness through to narcissistic personality disorder, for instance. I think in classical philosophy, there is at an least implicit principle that the philosopher is less subject to delusion than the untrained mind - the hoi polloi, if you like. They are more highly realised, they have a superior grip on reality.
From @Wayfarer's source:
Quoting 17th Century Theories of Substance | IEP
God, no. We tolerate every species of fool in my country; dunno about yours. But tolerate them we do, because freedom of speech is a rights-based equality, available to all.
Thanks. (I was at work when I asked, so not chasing links.)
It sounds so very much like subject & predicate, the small, boring result of a long and tangled history, I'm sure.
There is a sort of example that comes to mind that only fits this paradigm in a particular way.
Say I have three pretty straight sticks, and I arrange them to make a pretty good triangle on the ground. Does the triangle exist? Surely. Does it exist in the same way the sticks do? ? Apparently not. The sticks can be arranged in other ways, and remain relatively invariant throughout the process of arranging them, but the triangle ? well, the triangle only exists just so. It is apparently somewhat more ephemeral than the sticks.
One other point about this "arrangement of things" sort of example: no matter how they are arranged, not one of the sticks can bear the predicate "triangular". You might say that a given stick "becomes" an edge, or an edge of a triangle, something like that, and that's interesting. (What happens to the edges when you pick up the sticks?) But to get something that "is a triangle" you have to first take the collection of sticks altogether; you have to grant that "these three sticks" is the sort of thing that can take predicates like "make up a triangle". And what kind of reality does "these three sticks" have?
So shall we say that the collection of sticks and the triangle made from them have less reality than the individual sticks do? I could see it. It's hard for me to see why I'd want to say it, rather than make the specific spatial and temporal distinctions I can make, but there's something to it.
Anyway, none of this is about modes or predicates and what sort of existence they might have. Collections and arrangements have a different shadowy sort of existence. But they're all clearly related too.
Quoting Moliere
(There's a thread over there about non-existent objects, but I haven't looked at it. ? No, there's two of them.)
Sometimes workbooks for children have a kind of puzzle in them, where you're given a little group of pictures and are told to put them in order to make a story. They often rely on thermodynamics ? you're supposed to know that broken pieces of a vase don't rise from the ground (defying gravity as well) and assemble themselves into a vase on the table.
Let's call the world where that sort of thing doesn't happen "the real world." If you tend to tell yourself and others stories where that sort of thing does happen, then I'd be tempted to say your world is "less real" than mine. And insofar as people's beliefs are real, or at least a useful way of categorizing their behavior, and insofar as their behavior has consequences in the real world, I'd be tempted to say that people are capable of increasing or decreasing the reality of situations they are involved in. (It's like the response to "facts are theory-laden": let's make sure our theories are fact-laden.)
If we start with social groups and their behavior ? instead of starting with epistemology or cognitive science, and whatever conclusions we draw from that ? why shouldn't we make good use of words like "realistic" and "unrealistic"? Some people bring more reality to our discussions and our decisions; some people sap reality from our deliberations, lead us step by step into a fantasy world that is just less real, even though the actions we take in our fantasy world ? taking a stand against the baddies ? may have counterparts in the real world, like locking up real Japanese-Americans.
I also have in mind the sort of thing you can see in Peter Jackson's film Heavenly Creatures, where the characters begin to slip back and forth between the real world and their own fantasy world. We all do a bit of this, and it seems quite natural to put how much we do it on a scale. Mistaking a windmill on the horizon for a grain elevator is one thing; mistaking it for a dragon is another. At least grain elevators are real, and windmills and grain elevators are both members of "rural towers". But dragons ...
Quoting J
Right, and outside of particular contexts there are no degrees of knowledge. One can be a better physicist or mathematician than another, but there is no measure to determine purportedly different degrees of "insight into reality itself', as opposed to insight into or knowledge of real things.
Oh, we have plenty.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
And therein lies a considerable proportion of semiotics, among other things.
A deluded person's grip on reality is a property of them, not of the delusions. It would be the delusions that would need to admit of degrees of reality, rather than the degree of delusion of the subject. Paradigmatically though, delusions are that which are not real and we staunchly believe despite evidence.
IE that's an example of a predicate with an intensity parameter - a person's degree of grip on reality. And it's also not a degree of reality of what that person grasps.
I think a better one is more traditionally Aristotelian. Going back to the hierarchical ontology, E F Schumacher presents a version of that in his Guide for the Perpexed (1977). Schumacher articulates a version of traditional ontology where each level includes but transcends the attributes of the one preceeding.
"Mineral" = m (mineral - acted upon but inactive)
"Plant" = m + x (vegetative - organic but insentient)
"Animal" = m + x + y (organic, motile and sentient)
"Human" = m + x + y + z (organic, motile, sentient and rational)
These factors (x, y and z) represent ontological discontinuities. Schumacher argues that the differences can be likened to differences in dimension, and that humans manifest a higher degree of reality insofar as they uniquely exhibit life, consciousness and rational self-consciousness. Schumacher uses this perspective to contrast with the materialist view, which argues that matter alone is real and that life and consciousness can be reduced to it.
Which in turn suggests degrees of agency, the ability for automous action, on the one hand - minerals having none, and animals having ascending degrees of it - and also degrees of self-organisation, which likewise increase with degrees of sentience.
That's certainly a perspective.
"wall" = w
"beige wall" = wall + beige
Walls have a higher degree of reality when painted beige? I suppose that just means some properties are privileged, because no one wants to believe that.
I don't understand why anyone would want to say "higher degree of reality" when they mean "has more characteristic predicates applying to it", could you spell that out for me? What makes a predicate make something it applies to more real?
I suppose in line with what Schumacher says, 'more real' in the sense of possessing a greater degree of organisation, and a greater degree of agency as does matter. So in that sense evolution reveals greater horizons of possibility. But as noted at the outset, one of the characteristics of modern culture is the 'flattening' of ontology.
I think you can have hierarchical organisation of predicates without being committed to reality degrees. Like everything which is red is coloured - the former is on a "lower rung", or "higher rung" on a ladder of predicates, than the latter. Much like plant is on a lower or higher rung than the mineral. Why equate the concepts?
I'm sorry, I don't understand the question.
Balance is a relation that seems to arise and exist in degrees. Relevance and significance are other examples.
Substance as soul or psyche? Where does the suggestion come from?
My first reply gives some detail - 'substance' was used to translate ousia in Aristotle, meaning 'being' from the Greek verb 'to be'. So whereas substance in the usual sense is objective, in the philosophical sense it is nearer in meaning to 'being', which, I said, is nearer to 'subject'. The Greek word psych? translates to "soul" and can also mean "spirit", "ghost", or "self". Nowadays I think it's very common to think that substance in philosophy denotes something objectively existent, but it actually doesn't.
[quote=ChatGPT]Heidegger critiqued the translation of the Greek term ousia as "substance" because he believed it imposed a framework of interpretation foreign to the original Greek meaning. His objections arise from the following points:
Ontological Context in Greek Philosophy:
In ancient Greek thought, particularly in Aristotle, ousia primarily refers to "being," "essence," or "that which is." It is closely tied to the idea of something's presence or actuality (to ti en einai "what it was to be" or the essential being of something).
The term emphasizes the dynamic and relational aspect of being, especially as "being-in-the-world" or the way something appears and manifests itself in its existence.
Scholastic and Cartesian Influence on 'Substance':
The Latin translation of ousia as substantia during the medieval period introduced a static and metaphysical framework tied to Scholastic philosophy. In this context, "substance" became associated with the idea of an underlying, unchanging entity that supports properties or accidents.
This understanding was later reinforced in Cartesian metaphysics, where "substance" was used to denote self-contained, independent entities (e.g., res cogitans and res extensa).
Loss of the Temporal Dimension:
For Heidegger, ousia carries a temporal and existential significance in its original Greek usage, particularly in Aristotle's Metaphysics and Nicomachean Ethics. The term relates to the way beings are present and how they unfold or actualize in time. Translating it as "substance" strips it of this temporal and existential nuance, reducing it to a fixed, abstract category.
Heidegger's Project of Recovering Original Meaning:
Heidegger's broader philosophical project in Being and Time and other works involves recovering the original meaning of Being that Greek philosophy sought to articulate. He saw the translation of ousia as "substance" as emblematic of a long tradition of metaphysical thinking that obscured the question of being (Seinsfrage)
In short, Heidegger believed that translating ousia as "substance" distorted its original meaning by imposing foreign metaphysical constructs that emphasized stasis and independence, rather than the Greek sense of being as presence, essence, or actuality within a temporal and dynamic context.[/quote]
Suppose the ancient Greeks used to believe in the existence of souls, which are to be transferred to the world of idea when body dies. For the Platonic idealists, the world of idea would have been more real than the material world. Hence the reason why Socrates chose to die rather than accepting the offered pardon? He wanted to be in the world of idea rather than the world of matter. :D
Why not?
Let me ask you - is your knowledge of your own being knowledge of something objectively existent?
You cannot be the same being twice.
FYI, just in case you wanted to know, and even then notwithstanding the Enlightenment limitations, there is a sense in which the intensive quantity of degrees is meant to indicate the transition from the appearance of a thing, to the sensation of it. So it isnt so much a relative degree of reality, which is always a unity, as it is a relative degree of consciousness of it.
Physics proper says any change of energy state invokes a loss, so philosophically that physical loss is commensurate with the difference between the thing and the representation of it.
But if youre not interested in all that, Id still agree it is hard to imagine what it might mean to have a degree of reality.
And would my memory of the dream of the event be True-3?
If I tell you of my dream about an event, is your thought of the event True-4? Or only True-2, because your thougt is more about the event itself, rather than about my memory or dream of the event? And your thought about my dream is another True-2?
I suspect my scale is not valid. I suspect things are equally real, although in different categories. A table and thought of a table might be equally real, but one physical and the other mental. I don't see the logic of saying mental things are not real, since mental things, like meaning and intention, are the reason humans have shaped the world to the degree we have. Difficult for me to think the Empire State Building, Mona Lisa, Bach's unaccompanied violin music, War and Peace, and the internet exist because of things that are not real.
Could you spell this out a bit?
Quoting Janus
Same for truth, right? A statement is true or false. And yet, there's an idiom that rarely finds its way into philosophy: "There's some truth in what you say." I find it pretty interesting that people sometimes assign a degree of truth to what someone says, rather than following the binary, all-or-nothing model typical in philosophy.
Two readings of that idiom come to mind: (a) some of what you say is true, and some of it is false; (b) some of the truth is encompassed by what you say, but some of it isn't.
Most of the time, we're talking about an aggregate of statements, a whole story, for instance. We can go with (a) and count the individual statements that make up the story as true or false, and the 'degree of truth' would be something like a ratio. I just want to note, first, that there's a pronounced atomism to this approach, so if you have any objection to atomism, you ought to be a little uncomfortable with that. Besides which, this is not how philosophy usually treats aggregates of statements: we and them all together, and if any one of them is false, the story as a whole is false. ? At least that's how we're used to dealing with arguments. Even if it's defensible there, it looks pretty bone-headed for dealing with anything but deductive arguments. Admitting that a story can fall somewhere on a spectrum between true and false, as people often do, is clearly more sensible.
And then there's (b), where you've gotten some of the truth, but not the whole truth. Obviously this doesn't mean treating every speech as an account of the entire universe; it's usually a judgment that something importantly relevant has been left out. "Yes, I did all the things you say, just as you said, but you don't know why, so your story is incomplete in a way that makes a difference." Something like that.
I think this is, to some degree, central to @Wayfarer's approach. A materialistic account of life or consciousness, for instance, is fine so far as it goes, but it leaves out something important. This is what @Wayfarer says about science broadly, that it leaves out the first-person perspective and this is no incidental omission. There is some truth in natural science, according to him, but not the whole truth, and not because we're just not finished, but because we are excluding something important. More than not looking for it, when we stumble across it, we push it back out.
So that's a defense of the idea of 'degrees of truth'. My previous post attempted to straightforwardly apply the idea, and forthrightly say there's more or less reality in an account or a discussion, and I think that would work in both the (a) and (b) senses.
It doesn't seem to have much to do with the hierarchical ontology @Wayfarer is talking about, but I wanted to see if I could find a use on my own for something we might call "degrees of reality".
I am little surprised that so far no one has suggested another approach ? maybe again because it tends to be treated as a binary. That would be claims that there is a hidden reality, a deeper reality than the one we know. I suppose people don't usually say that makes this one less real, but simply illusion. Always the binary. But if there's a reality behind or beyond this one, couldn't there be another behind that? Why assume there are exactly two, rather than admit that if there's more than one, there may be any number? In which case, it seems to me more natural to assume such realities are on a spectrum. (Even scientists sometimes seem to talk this way, if not in terms of reality then in terms of "what's going on": it seems to us one thing, but it's really something else; and behind that there's something even stranger; and we don't know what's behind that, but maybe the universe is a simulation, or a calculation, or something else quite different from what we expected a hundred years ago.)
Now if you hold such a view, your ontology of the entities in this "plane" might also be hierarchical, because some creatures are sensible of the other reality (or realities) and some aren't. Or at least have that capacity. Some can leave the cave of this reality and experience a higher or a deeper reality, and some can't. Most Christians seem to believe something a bit like this: we're only in this reality temporarily, and this whole reality is itself temporary; rocks and plants don't have an afterlife ahead of them, but we do, and we're not sure if Fido does. Entities here are of different 'ranks' because they have a different relationship to the deeper reality.
And so the question remains ? and I suppose this is for you, @Wayfarer ? whether the great chain of being and related ontologies are inherently religious in nature.
I've sketched some pretty mundane uses for 'degrees of truth' or 'degrees of reality'. Is there anything in between, any use for the idea that isn't religious or logico-linguistic?
Doesn't that construe degrees of reality like degrees of accuracy of its representation? The scientists aren't going to think that tables are less real than the compounds that make them up. Whenever people with science backgrounds say stuff like "People can't really touch each other because our atoms can't be in the same place" they're just zooted.
Maybe. But there is a certain sort of discourse that says things only appear to be a certain way, but are actually another way, but says so non-lazily, offering an explanation for why things appear to be a way they aren't really. It gives a bit of 'substance' to the appearance itself, doesn't treat it as just a mistake. (Which is an option for everyday cases of taking an illusory view of something ? you're mistaken, indefensibly so.) The only reason I thought you might settle on degrees here ? rather than just appearance/reality ? is if you make this move more than once, so there are layers.
It's not important. Insofar as it's just a manner of speaking, it's probably not independently interesting but borrowing from our culture's religious conceptual inheritance. I guess.
(OK, maybe not quite "end of story" :smile: )
Not quite in the spirit of the enterprise though.
I've taken two approaches so far: one is to see if I might have any use for saying something has a higher degree of reality than something else, and I can imagine this being so, although it's a little weird; the other is examining what @Wayfarer in particular might find interesting about it, as he understands it, beyond it being something people used to think.
If it's just a marker of the difference between religious and secular worldviews, it is not interesting in itself. But if it is, at least in part, constitutive of that difference -- that is, if it makes more sense to say you're religious because you have such a belief than to say you have such a belief because you're religious -- then the idea has independent interest and could conceivably find a place in a hybrid worldview, or even in a secular one. But if it can't be made sense of without the support of religious conviction, I don't know that there's much to talk about. Philosophically.
True, and I admit to a lifelong dislike of the term "real". But when you say that you want to see if "I might have any use for saying something has a higher degree of reality than something else," this seems like a good way to go. One of the things we philosophers do a lot of is recommending or stipulating or otherwise offering a use of a term that makes sense for an interesting purpose. We can certainly treat "real" like that, as you're suggesting.
It is curious that the substance/mode or subject/predicate thing somehow gets tangled up with an historically somewhat religious question about whether there is some deeper, truer reality behind the reality we experience. And it's hard not to associate that tangling with Plato, and whatever cultural currents Plato was in touch with. (It comes up in Kimhi, I think, in discussing why we say mortality is a property of Socrates rather than saying Socrates is an exemplar of Mortality.)
Oh I never got nearly that far!
It's an old question. I think he mentions it in connection with negation because there's an argument (attributed there to Geach, I think) that we pick Socrates as the subject and mortality as the predicate because mortality can be negated but Socrates cannot. Which is a stupid argument, and also entirely misses Frege's point about force.
But that's a sideline of a sideline.
Yes, I'm talking about Forms. Why not say Mortality is manifested in, among others, this little temporal object called "Socrates", but Mortality is itself more enduring, more perfect, more real than such objects?
Exemplification's got the same kind of weirdness with existential import as the application of predicate to subject does, right? Socrates is mortal either takes a already individuated object with the name "Socrates" and predicates "is mortal" of it. Or alternatively you take the property "Mortality" as primary and somehow zip up a chunk of it into Socrates. Though such a property also does not admit of degree, surely, as beings are either mortal or they are not.
Spinoza in Ethics has a claim that the more real an entity is, the more attributes it partakes in. Which are like essential parameters of all that is.
The degree of reality there seems to be a bit like a volume switch between 0 and infinity, where 0 is those entities which partake in no attributes, and infinity is substance, God or nature. We're stuck on 2, thought and extension, rocks are at 1, just extension.
Another being-ish degree concept I'm familiar with is from Manuel De Landa, he conceives of individuation in a parametrised way. How diffuse or crisp are the borders between entities, how distributed is it in space or over a concept? Like a nation state with an open border vs a patrolled one, or who is granted a what type of keycard to buildings in a industrial estate respectively. Though an entity with little to no internal boundaries would still exist, like the components of a single element gas. (eg here for DeLanda using the concept).
The degree of reality concept thus seems to require a measure, an origin point, from which discrepancies are marked, and special graduations on that scale. For Spinoza this seems to be nature or God as the most real, at infinity, and entities are more real if they partake in more of God's attributes. 0 attributes being the origin point, and attribute participation counting being the measure.
The subject/predicate way of construing it doesn't seem to require a privilege regime of properties, like attributes, nor does it have an origin point by which all entities have their predications' realities measured.
To contrast the two, DeLanda's approach has degree properties that express the configuration of a given being, as does the subject-predicate approach. Whereas the Spinoza one has degree properties that just count how many attributes an entity partakes in.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I think what Srap's done as quoted is blend those two ideas together, in which a Greater Exemplification of a single Property (which properties?) makes The Exemplar more real. Spinoza had a good answer for which properties (predicates) make an entity more real, when you can say they partake in more attributes. So if X participates in attribute X1 and X2, but Y only participates in attribute Y1, Y is less real than X since it's only got one attribute. What's the answer when you've got one property and you're measuring how well something exemplifies it? How do you relate different strengths of exemplification of different properties? Is Everest more real than a dust mote on the count of Everest's largeness and mass?
Another, tangential thought about exemplification, is that if X is a maximal exemplar of P, then it will be minimal exemplar of P's antonym Q. Eg, the dust mote might be "maximally real" for smallness, and Everest might be "maximally real" for largeness, but that gives us no means to distinguish degrees of realty between entities measured on the same axis, without another theory that links properties together and tells you how their combination induces the degree of reality of the entity they apply to.
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Quick note: some of what you say about Spinoza suggests "is God" or maybe "is like God" as an interesting predicate, and then you get @Wayfarer's great chain of being by asking of each entity "How close to being God are you? How much of God is manifested in you?" something like that. One predicate to rule them all, one scale with which to measure being
It isn't a very good scale. It jettisons the distinctions between all properties. It's exactly the same scale which would let you answer "What's a bloody mary made of?" with "7" and be totally accurate.
If your intent is to make shit up, it's an excellent scale, imposing minimal constraint on your creativity. "Like our Heavenly Father, Everest is great ..."
I do really like the idea of trying to come up with a continuous graduation reality concept, which isn't an accuracy of a representation, or a way of counting things that already apply, or a way of saying how individuated an entity is. But I don't think it's possible, honestly.
I think the latter idea, parametrising individuation, is about as close as you get. But you still need a background of individuating processes for it. The origin point is an analytical posit rather than an ontological ground.
Or, in pastiche of Berkeley, everything exists in the mind of God. And then what? Does He care more about some of His thoughts than others? Find some more interesting? Forget some?
There really is no deciding between the world being one or being many, and some of this overlaps that. I think.
The oneness of the many is the manyness of the one, or something like that.
Thanks. Another new word for me.
You can thank my students.
Why dont you build a giant paddock, and collect all the furniture of the universe inside of it. Then you can determine degrees of reality among the objects
They were all real!
That was quick work! I was still trying to build my paddock.
You mentioned that a collection of three sticks can make a triangle - which is a form. It signifies. A simple example, but the same principle is behind hylomorphism (matter-form dualism) and semiotics. A sign or symbol has an identity that transcends the material constituents from which it is composed.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
That was the impulse behind my clumsy analogy of degrees of sanity. The delusional subject doesn't see 'what is'. But there's a sense in which, in much of pre-modern philosophy, even up to Spinoza, that by default, we're ('we' being the hoi polloi, the w/man in the street) not able to see 'what is', a mark of sagacity.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
It is associated with religion, but really it's a metaphysic, which is a separate matter, although in practice they're often closely associated. In this case, maybe a picture really is worth a thousand words.
Historically, as I mentioned, the idea of the great chain of being was associated with Ptolmaic and Aristotelian cosmology, with the superlunary spheres and so on. Which of course all came crashing down with the Scientific Revolution., and along with it the idea of an hierarchical ontology, replaced with the single dimension of matter-energy-space-time.
The Great Chain of Being was also a book published in the 1930's by Arthur Lovejoy (turgid read, by the way.) But that book is said to be the origin of an academic sub-discipline namely, History of Ideas, which identifies fundamental concepts that persist over time and shows how they evolve, recombine, and influence different cultural contexts across disciplines and historical periods.
But heirarchical ontologies are never going to go away, various iterations of them are already percolating throughout science, philosophy and religious studies.
The more I think about it the less I seem to be able to distinguish between these two options, except perhaps in the second option there are not only or not even falsities, but in addition or instead, irrelevancies.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
@Wayfarer and I disagree on this point. I find The Blind Spot in Science to be making a point which is either trivial or irrelevant (or maybe those are the same). I have made the analogy with the epoché in phenomenology where the question of the existence of the objective world is "bracketed" for methodological reasons (since what is being investigated is the nature of our experience of things). In science the subjective nature of experience is bracketed because its aim is to investigate the attributes of the things themselves rather than the attributes of our experience of them.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
So, I think this view is mistaken. Of course science is not the whole truth and nor is phenomenology. They are investigations in two different paradigmatic contexts. How would you incorporate for instance subjective experience into the study of physics, chemistry, geology or even biology? Such an attempt, even if possible, would not be helpful, to say the least; or at least I can't imagine how it could be. I have made this objection many times to wayfarer, but he never attempts to address it. If you have any ideas along those lines l'll be interested.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
This is the nub I think. Religions come with a built notion of hierarchy. The shaman who knows things the rest don't. The prophets who have received revelation from on high. The angels and archangels and God himself, the absolute. All of this can be understood in terms of the human propensity for power over others, for unquestionable authority.
That said, I don't doubt that different people have different kinds of consciousnesses, and that it is possible to enjoy altered states where novel insights seem to abound. But they always remain subjective insights, there is no way to measure them such as to make the intersubjectively compelling. As a guru you would always be preaching to the converted, and people believe what they believe for their own reasons no doubt.
All in all the study of so-called higher consciousness cannot be made a science, even if reliable techniques to alter states of consciousness can be found and employed. There is no way , outside the intersubjective contexts of things that can be measured, to determine if my insight is more real or true than yours. And even if there were could that mean that my very being would be more real or true than yours?
One area I do see what appears to me at least a real difference is in the arts. Different works of art. music. poetry and literature seem to be more alive or more 'true to life than others, in multifarious ways. But again, this is not something that can be definitively determined or perhaps even determined at all, intersubjectively speaking.
What if we returned to one kind of common talk about reality, where "real" means something like "vivid," "solid," "experientially impressive" -- that whole collection of descriptions?
So my written-down account of the dream I had last night isn't very real, relative to what I'm trying to describe. My memory, on which basis I write the description, is a little realer but still quite far from the dream itself. The dream, when I had it, was considerably more vivid, more real. And the subject of the dream -- a trip I took to Venice, let's say -- far exceeds the dream-images in reality. Until I reach the Form of Venice, or some other heavenly realm, it's the realest Venice I can know.
Something like that? I think this is different from "accuracy of representation" because the important parameter is "vividness of impression," not accuracy.
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262553032/the-blind-spot/
In so far as "levels of being" ascribes differing values to different things it is an evaluation, and so it is about our attitude towards things rather than how they are.
Which is fine, provided that our evaluations are not mistake for how things are.
But her existence is equally dependent on her mother. Arguably, you are less real because you're farther back the line. The train engine is most real. The second car is second-most real. The third car is third-most real, etc. (And now ditch the linear paradigm.)
The idea seems simpler than many are making it. It's basically levels of ontological dependence (whether per se or per accidens). But then apparently we want to make it an extrapolation of Aristotle's distinction between substance and accident, and that's where things become more confusing. Still, the basic idea seems straightforward.
Why do you think the first articulation of the is/ought problem came from David Hume, the 'godfather of positivism', and a principal of the Scottish Enlightenment? Not coincidental, right? 'What is', as distinct from 'what ought to be', in Hume's context, is what is precisely measurable and can be stated with certainty. Which doesn't even extend to causal relations, as it turned out.
Quoting Leontiskos
As noted, the use of the term 'substance' is inherently confusing and misleading in respect to metaphysics. See the reference upthread to Heidegger's criticism of the use of the term as a translaton for ouisia.
Imagine if, in that essay we're referring to, the expression was 'all that is real, is beings and their modes of existence' instead of 'substance and modes'. Even if it's also not quite correct, I think it conveys the original intention more clearly.
Probably down to Hume, I don't see as that matters much. But values can be stated with certainty and measured.
We need a metric space whose points are things that are real. Then a distance function for pairs of points. But first, one needs to decide what "real" means. I suggest anything our consciousness registers, from the moon to flights of fancy. But where the purely physical runs up against the purely mental could be a problem worth a thousand pages of philosophical ramblings.
Go ahead and explain that. Some of us are uneducated.
Ah, well it's my fault then for picking a well-known geometric shape. I only meant that the sticks are arranged in such a way that they make up a thing, temporarily anyway.
Arrangements of things into other things is, in some circles, a core problem of metaphysics. And it's something a little different from the problem of collections, which is why I mentioned them both.
And it does raise questions of hierarchy in a straightforward way. Each of the sticks is a part of the triangular whole. I didn't want to rehearse all the usual arguments here (triangles of Theseus, and so on), but just see what we might say about hierarchy, since that's our topic.
In between the moon, and my imagination is me and distance out of my bounds, surviving outside of them is not worth experience what I can staying within them, in the environment I am well adapted to and attached / drawn to being. The space is between. In the space is possibly nothing. The imagination and moon....the moon is seen from a far distance, the imagination is at no distance from the place you are standing, the grounds you rest upon, used to travel from place to place.
The imagination has no place without the mind, that comes from the human being from the powers within using the organs we were born with, to function as a species living in nature. Human nature, the mind is of it. The thinking is of experiences as humans with a mind of your own. The brain, is the hub for the mind. The brain that undergoes damage from a trauma, like an accident or something the cognitive abilities can be lost, needing to recover, retrain, or deal with the loss and change of lifestyle for the remaining time alive.
Perhaps the space between is just that, but perhaps if a "thing" ought to be between it has to do with the transition or power that goes into conscious mind's of a human brain. As far as I am concerned, a soul, spirit, consciousness as an EXPERIENCE is linked to the brain, meaning without the brain the conscious experience of humans would not be...Consciousness is aware of the body and the connection to it? The soul is of consciousness and consciousness is of human nature or human evolution with is of life...which is of, love? Sex? Partners? The perfect match?
What that even requires, is of the aware being, soul included. Feet moving, the body brings the brain along for the ride! Or run...The brain is moving, mind is included, linked to the person, like a ball and chain.....body is moving, imagination is moving, trailing behind...whipping around turns, bumping into things, aware of location and self in the world via mind, dreams, and imaginations, visions, hallucinations, etc
Between is nothing meaning, I am wondering if it is even a "thing" , should it be a thing if it were to be moved, meaning by human aid. Causing the motion by hand or with purpose/intentions to indirectly continously loop, or remain in a cycle. is it that the cycle is stuck, or can that become stabilized in that where it is stuck, as the cycle continues, the stuckness caused the growth and stopped the movement in the natural direction, how to get stuck? If we can claim being in a stuck cycle, are we aware of something else to give us the idea in the first place, if we could be stuck, do we not for sure know where we should be? Stuck in a cycle or stable in a current? Flow.......Like a hobo on the tracks waiting for a train to hop. That train has wheels, engine, and motion...staying on track, set up and built to transport things. Between the imagination and the moon depends on the track or path taken, and the fate awaits.
The timing of the minds thoughts, the act of thinking, and the SPEED of comprehension cognitively, understanding thinking and how much trust the self has in themselves is measured? Sure, why not...but Also, why? Unbothered. Yet, I am still curious to say the least, but not fixed or sure of my stance. I am just sharing what I do know and that is in the form of typed thoughts. Streaming thoughts. It's a style.....catch it if you can. Note it, but it is not but also is always what IT seems. If what it seems is in fact aligned with what IT IS, that is just a way to explain after the fact, using justified actions for self in that moment...it passes judgement with no questions.
Anyways, to jgill's question again, what is in between is not of measured motion, perhaps the speed is timed but it has to do with the instinct or muscle memory we have learned how its being used/functioning, is that reasonable to cognitive skills and performance of such? Usually so, we can tell in the womb nowadays the disabilities of the baby before it is out of the mother and into it's first day of life breathing oxygen. The organs attached is linked to quality of life..genetics are telling, precaution is taken quicker with advanced medicine. Is the medical field as a whole where they need to be at the level they operate and work in? Are people paid what they deserve? Usually not, but we accept or tolerate a rate that meets our basic needs at the minimum, sometimes we lose grip of self in realty and abuse our time by neglecting the self in the present.
We just need to be aware, become it, then decide after you really reflect. By grounding oneself and acting as you will...happens with reason, and as accordingly to benefits us to our line, or boundary we set for self needs. We need and want differently, but it can be based on what we consider to be efficient to maintain lifestyle currently experiencing. The life you lead, the day to day self of character and the alignment with soul is in the consciousness of self. That requires awareness....of the body with the will and the timing of feelings and reflection was used to cause a change or certain outcome? Only one outcome exists...has, will, does, ought, shall and it is what and when it will and was always ought. To be. At it. Life is at it, death has had it, the soul remains and reminds all in a collective consciousness
This person (WE) has/ought to have more trust in ourselves. The power is in our hands, and from our minds of our life experience in motion, space and with the track of time.the change and eventually unchangeable direction or movement maybe power (time constraint) to move thoughts using the required brain, intentions behind it could add to degree of energy or power added / wasted to importance/attention/work required to perform these cognitive skills, mentally, and communicate it / write it down physically in tangible material. But the soul is moving from these pieces of work. Moving is it? Or fluctuations occur and we can feel them in the air. Our senses inform us of things, and our brain tells US what is going on in order to know how to make the next move, as we are moving in time. Day after day, tomorrow is coming, today is there. Time was lost, time is never gone just...What else was gone, besides our selves? Our minds can be lost, but what are the chances they are found? Good as new? Better? Worse?
The condition is dependent. Time, interest that life revolves around, attention spending efficiency, awareness. In others, in self. How do emotions attach to tangible material things, but the experience being subjective doesnt matter. The objective part is that it is all subjective, biased, or effected by envirment, nature, nurture....but luck, chance, and timing is funny. Love is a funny thing. A funny thing and the humor of it, is of the funny person and laughed at by those with similar humor, aware high, or those who are followers, lost/looking rightfully so, rationally...doing what they ought to be, right where they need to be. THEY have to SEE that first, but to see means choosing to ignore what they know from what they see, is believing what they dont want to see, but blaming the world praying for God or the world to change. Before we ask of such demands of the world, Universe, God, Angels, As above so below, we ought to have answered and confirmed with surety that no change on our end is worth the effort. That option exists, the mind state or frame under the influence of many factors play a role in decision making moments that cant be undone past a certain point.
The art we see, music we hear, words we read move us. The way they made us move and feel are two different things and separate from what we think. When we think and move and feel, they happen almost fluidly. The arts are observed. The emotions, are moving created and used differently impacting subjectively, meaning each person is experiencing it differently, how the life path is built and where we are moving towards depends on the light we get from the darkest place we see is based on memory, learned lessons, life experience, time invested, and wisdom gained...Was fate earned, received or delivered. According to time and nature or by observing what we can say is real...What we believe to be true is real. Fake news is real, as that...fake news. It always existed, we made it what it is. We deal with it separately, at a later time and boy is it the occasion....
Moving the imagination, thoughts, ideas, visions, dreams to a piece of work, art depicting experiences, events, emotions, dreams etc. literally as they were (how can we know? who cares? do we need to? sometimes yes, sometimes NO) Art can be an exaggeration and that is style. This is of course opinion based, but it is possible to objective or "grade" Art for the lets say, taste, technique, impact, rubric perhaps? I am far from an artist, but a creative.
Moving thoughts along a track, hmm. Those grounds for thoughts to thrive are different and unfamiliar territory for some. It is the place, to be, not bound to anything in space or time as we know it because we experience what we know in the mind, dream state similar or lifelike to the detailed accounts of that experience. Having two at one time different experiences of one thing.... space time, or travel as a material body WITH thoughts attributed to us. These thoughts are of US, the awareness of the consciousness is a degree to which effects the experience in waves of intensity, impacting mentally, physically, emotionally, spiritually or all in different times, combos, and for reasons that are knowable...ought to be known by the self, which makes the soul AWARE of the body that is experiencing life.
The communication between soul and consciousness is or may be unknowable at the human level, as far as what is beyond us...well, we ought to find out before we die. Or is dying required for the cycle to complete? Birth to Death. The human lifespan, life cycle...death cycle? What is keeping these cycles intact where they may be in space? Evolution? I think evolution emerges from or is caused by the specific species and it's life cycle from start to no end, but how it arrives to one. When the end is near, can we feel it coming?
The path of the cycles. The placement, the power of it. I think only we humans have the pleasure or luck to experience it, life, for what it is....either which way does not matter, because their is/was/will be no other option at the time when it counts. It as in LIFE, counts. It answers the question, whether you like it or not. The ask is what you get, "you have to give to get," I like to say and truly believe. It is that simple, As above so below and you get what you give......the thing is you get what you give is biased towards the being and will of the person...it is not karma, it is like ultimate fate. Unreasonable doubt....
Creative minded people and links to authenticity and individuality is something I am now finding may be interesting to look deeper into...Perhaps, this is how/why you can point them out with the name actually being present. Specific artists known for the style. The way they write, sound, sing, play an instrument is observable and by those who call themselves fans or just those who happen to frequent the work by chance or choice, unbothered...for now. --cvt 11/21/24 1241AM, hold before posting, current version above is pre-draft, T1, og
Great discussion topic! 11/21/24 1035pm cvt
I'll take that as a cue. As is well-known, Einstein paused on one of his afternoon walks, and asked his walking companion, Abraham Pais, 'does the moon continue to exist when nobody is looking at it?' Of course, was the expected answer. But why ask it? What prompted that? It was the now well-known 'Copenhagen Interpretation' of quantum physics, formulated by his younger contemporaries Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and Max Born, among others (although at the time, the name hadn't been coined.) The question crystallizes the tension between the realist view (that objects have determinate properties independently of their observation) and Bohr's attitude - that physics can only ever reveal nature as exposed to our method of questioning.
Now how this relates to this question in the OP. Werner Heisenberg, one of the founders, actually happens to believe that reality comes in degrees. Heisenberg, a lifelong student of Greek philosophy, re-purposes Aristotle's idea of 'potentia' to solve the conundrums of quantum physics.
[quote=Quantum Mysteries Dissolve....;https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/context/quantum-mysteries-dissolve-if-possibilities-are-realities] three scientists argue that including potential things on the list of real things can avoid the counterintuitive conundrums that quantum physics poses. ...At its root, the idea holds that the common conception of reality is too limited. By expanding the definition of reality, the quantums mysteries disappear. In particular, real should not be restricted to actual objects or events in spacetime. Reality ought also be assigned to certain possibilities, or potential realities, that have not yet become actual. These potential realities do not exist in spacetime, but nevertheless are ontological that is, real components of existence.
This new ontological picture requires that we expand our concept of what is real to include an extraspatiotemporal domain of quantum possibility, write Ruth Kastner, Stuart Kauffman and Michael Epperson.
Considering potential things to be real is not exactly a new idea, as it was a central aspect of the philosophy of Aristotle, 24 centuries ago. An acorn has the potential to become a tree; a tree has the potential to become a wooden table. Even applying this idea to quantum physics isnt new. Werner Heisenberg, the quantum pioneer famous for his uncertainty principle, considered his quantum math to describe potential outcomes of measurements of which one would become the actual result. The quantum concept of a probability wave, describing the likelihood of different possible outcomes of a measurement, was a quantitative version of Aristotles potential, Heisenberg wrote in his well-known 1958 book Physics and Philosophy. It introduced something standing in the middle between the idea of an event and the actual event, a strange kind of physical reality just in the middle between possibility and reality.[/quote]
According to this interpretation, the act of observation 'actualises' or 'manifests' the potential possibilities described by the wave function ?.
Something which I think is pregnant with all kinds of philosophical possibilities.
I recall a reductionist explanation of this phenomenon wherein the scientist explained the blind spot, and went on to say, 'whereas in reality...' there may be something different there, in that blind spot.
The reductionist wanted there to be reality or not-reality, a binary choice. But to me the difference between ordinary visual perception and visual perception through instruments involve different angles on 'reality', which one might distinguish by talk of 'degrees'.
Kings
Justice
I could see what someone would mean by saying that gravity is "more real" than kings and that kings are "moral real" than justice.
There's an extensional component to "gravity" that "justice" doesn't have (unless Platonism is correct), and there's an intensional component to "kings" that "gravity" doesn't have.
Consciousness
Matter
Consciousness may not itself be more real than matter. But the state of affairs that includes both consciousness and matter is "more" than the state of affairs consisting of only matter. What else can that "more" be if not "more real"? Ideas are realized. Things become real that weren't before in a non-trivial, non-mechanistic way.
Well, one definition of "real" is "existing or occurring in the physical world; not imaginary, fictitious, or theoretical; actual".
Justice, for example, isn't a physical thing or at least not a physical thing in the sense that gravity is a physical thing.
Just like how quantum mechanics basically only form a defined and measured reality when probabilities are in relation to something (the measurement/instrument, surrounding elements defining it). I.e The only things that isn't, is that which is in total detachement to everything in reality and everything that is, is that which bonds with something else.
Kind of like a powder of iron dust on a table, they have no defined form in their spread out state of possible forms to be part of, but moving a magnet through (reality/measurement/known states), gravitate the non-states to becoming part of a known state (being part of and in relation to the magnet and its form).
If the imaginary could be summed up as the result of a physical specific state of our brain and its present energy distribution, would that not mean it is also existing? And since theory and fiction can only be something when interpreted or imagined by something, they become a form of physical reality through it? Even though the perception we have of it isn't what constitutes the actual physical of them, just like our perception of light isn't the be all end all of the properties of its physical nature.
Cogito
Certainly my concept of justice exists as a physical brain state, but when we talk about justice we're not talking about people's brain states.
No, but the brain state that produce concepts of justice is akin to magenta not existing as an actual physical color. It's a state of physical reality that produce a perceptive reality in us, but that reality isn't a thing, it's just a product of the physical, i.e there is a physical state that constitutes the effect of your internalized concept of justice.
Does magenta exist?
I distinguish sensations from concepts. Colour is like pain, not like justice.
In what way does your concept of justice distinguish itself from your perception of pain? The sensation of pain or perception of magenta is just as much a construct of your brain as your concept of justice. The brain doesn't distinguish between the two, its merely forming different neural pathway maps based on what is going on. Like, what happens if you condition someone to feel pain when thinking about a specific concept of justice? Then you have a neural map that is both an internalized concept of justice as well as pain, inseparable as a perceptive thing.
Well that doesn't beg any questions.....
Ideas exist in the physical world (ta-da). Justice is an idea. Ergo justice is real.
Quoting Corvus
ergo sum
I didn't say it isn't real. I said that I could see what someone would mean by saying that gravity is more real than justice.
There is the concept of gravity and there is gravity.
There is the concept of justice, but that's it.
With gravity there is a physical thing distinct from our brain states that "corresponds" to the concept, but with justice there isn't.
Well there's certainly a distinction between the concept of pain and the sensation of pain. They are both brain states but they're different kinds of brain states.
I don't think the concept of sight is of much comfort to a blind man.
Descartes was right in saying the most self evident reality is"cogito" or "Ich denke" in Kant. All other reality is based on it. Indeed one cannot doubt one is thinking. In Kant, all experience is based on Ich denke, so it is the a priori precondition for possibility of all existence.
While the two can be different on paper, both are composed of brain states. Both are perceptive and internalized products of physical processes. Just like magenta doesn't exist, it is the interplay of the biological being that is us, with the photons of specific wavelengths that forms our perception of magenta.
In essence, all is part of the physical as a holistic physical thing. There are no dividing lines in physical reality, only due to the human psychological process of categorization, which is automatic and fundamental to human cognition.
So our act of categorizing and dividing up things is for us to make sense of it, but in reality, there is only one whole of interplaying energy and matter.
Because of it, all exist. Illusions that we experience as the perception of reality or concepts of abstract things are merely illusions, they don't exist as we see them in our minds eye or conceptual process, they're only illusions we attribute as existing because that's how we operate as animals. My perception of reality, my concepts and ideas are only as as real as me hallucinating something into a belief of its existence, but it doesn't exist.
The only thing that exist and is the actual reality of my illusionary experience, is my brain state producing it.
Quoting Michael
Yet, if his eyes don't work, his brain will still have the capacity to form a neural map that produces an internal image. And the concept of sight will still be something he internalize, even if the abstract nature of it for him produce a wildly alien internalization for the seeing person.
:up:
If we can agree that there can be degrees of reality then, for my part, that is the critical thing.
My avatar agrees.
Yes, it is tricky. This notion is developed in St. Thomas through the concept of "virtual quantity" (more on that at the very bottom if you're interested).
So, to the skeptics, , I will offer up what I think is one of the better summaries of how this works in Plato, in a context focusing on his psychology and human freedom (freedom as self-determination and self-governance).
The key thing here is "self-determination." But this can be taken to be "self-determination" in a more abstract, metaphysical sense as well, as it is in other readings of Plato, Aristotle and Hegel (who is in some sense very Aristotelian). For example:
So, to 's point here: "Seems to me that again there is an is/ought problem here," the response from this wide tradition would be to say that there isn't precisely because the Good by which things are "good or bad" (note: not just morally, but also in cases like a "good car" or a "bad basketball player") are not unrelated to the Unity by which anything is any thing at all. Rather, the ability to say true things about things, or for there to be discrete entities that are relatively self-determining such that they are not merely bundles of external causes in a single truly global process, is grounded in aims, teloi. And these in turn entail some notion of goodness vis-à-vis ends.
The obvious rejoinder from the modern context here is that "rocks don't have ends," which seems true, but Aristotle doesn't think rocks are proper beings.* And, whereas being a substance in Aristotle has to do with contradictory opposition (i.e. a thing is either man or not-man, fish or not-fish), unity and multiplicity involve contrariety (i.e. privation, perfect privation, or relation), and so it occurs on a sliding scale. Hence, man is, of the sensible things we know, the most able to become unified, precisely because man has access to transcendent aims (but note that such transcendence does not preclude a naturalistic understanding of human essence or self-determination).
Of course, this position also relies on a notion of analogical predication. What is good for a tiger, an ant, or a daffodil is good in an analogous sense, just as what constitutes healthy food varies between a horse and a bee, or between individual human beings (e.g. peanut butter is not "healthy" for those who are allergic to it.) But on the classical view we must not make the mistake of assuming that this makes goodness equivocal or fully relativized; the same principle of unity is at work in each, but reaches a higher, more perfected form in some organisms, most notably man. And this same understanding is fruitfully applied to human organizations (also centered around aims), or human practices, such as the sciences (which in turn foster freedom and self-determination, by reducing ignorance, increasing our causal powers through techne, teaching us things about our own nature and habit formation, etc.)
Analogy is key to how there can be different "levels" to things. For instance, it is what allows St. Thomas in the Disputed Questions to claim that, while truth is primarily "in the mind," it is still secondarily "in things." The problem of moving beyond skepticism in modern thought can be usefully framed in terms of an inability to conceive of truth or knowledge outside of binary contradictory opposition. Peter Redpath has a lot of great stuff on this, although his lectures (on Youtube) are not always easy to follow.
The term had also morphed quite a bit by the time Descartes and Locke are working with it. In the Aristotelian context, substances are things. There are different types of thinghood. A cat is not a horse and a horse is not a mountain. "Being can be said many ways." "Green" and "fast" exist, as do "larger" or "heavier," but there are parasitic on thinghood. For something to be green or fast it has to be something.
Aristotle frames his project helpfully in a literature review of past thinkers, and the problem of how being can be one (i.e. everything that is, "is" in a certain sense and interacts with everything else, even if only indirectly) but also be many (i.e. our world is composed of many things of many different types.)
I think this is important to keep in mind because later critiques of substance (e.g. Deleuze) fall into equivocating on the later notion of substance and the Aristotelian one. And then it is also easy to think of "subjects" as "knowing subjects" and not merely the "subject of predication." But I don't think the conceptualization in terms of "finite" versus "infinite/transcendent," or "mental" versus "extended" are liable to be helpful, at least not for understanding a good deal of the philosophy that centers around different levels of reality.
Particularly, I think the "Great Chain of Being" makes significantly more sense when situated inside an understanding of the Doctrine of Transcendentals, but that itself is a particularly thorny issue that often gets written off in ways that don't understand it (e.g. Scruton's book on beauty jettisons it out of hand on the grounds that things that we generally agree are bad, e.g. MIRVs landing on their targets, might also be beautiful, which is really misunderstanding the position).
Right, the idea that doing ontology itself might be a limit on freedom in Derrida and Foucault, or Deleuze's attempt to save ontology by making it "creative," presuppose that metaphysics is more something "we create" and less something "discovered." If it is the latter, then not only can some opinions be more correct than others, but it will also be the case that wrong opinions lead to ignorance, and on very many views ignorance itself is a limit on freedom (e.g. the entire idea of "informed consent," or just the basic idea that one cannot successfully do what one doesn't know how to do.)
----
Anyhow, on virtual quantity, I have some stuff from my notes:
* Just for notes on where Aristotle defines beings (which is also a major part of the Metaphysics)
For these writers, its not just we who create ontological realities, as human beings or subjects. It is the world itself that continually creates itself, and we are just along for the ride. Right and wrong opinions refer to what is pragmatically workable on the basis of how the world is laid out within a given set of practices. As the world changes and along with it our practices, the criteria of right and wrong, knowledge and ignorance, also change.
Right, there is overlap on the background suppositions, but also differences that lead to different conclusions. I think the way in which "freedom" in conceptualized, as primarily potential or primarily act, is a big one, but this conceptualization also flows from other disagreements. There is obviously going to be disagreement on: "Philosophy does not consist in knowing and is not inspired by truth. Rather, it is categories like Interesting, Remarkable, or Important that determine success or failure."
I suppose the response to the adventure of rollicking new avenues of thought might be something like the comparison between a trained pianist and someone who has never played a piano before. Yes, the pianist is, in a sense, constrained by long habit, yet at the same time they are free to do things the novice isn't.
Edit: I would think that less focus being placed on the individual is probably less of an area of disagreement here, since this is also an area where the classical tradition varies from early modern and much contemporary thought (we could consider here the influence of Stoicism and particularly Epictetus.) To me, the disagreement lies more in the questions of "what is knowable?" "how is it known?" and "what drives how history and the world unfold?"
Well, there's a lot here, and I won't address remotely all of it.
But I have a simple question. Is this real?
For example, there's this quote from Robert Wallace:
There's plenty here that sounds plausible, and it's nice to see it put in somewhat practical-sounding terms.
But are the terms used here ? "depression" for instance ? only practical-sounding? There is a unity of psychology and philosophy here that may have much to recommend it, but is it based on the study of human beings? Is it based on therapeutic experience? Is it real, or are terms like "rational self-governance" counters in a game of philosophy?
I really don't mean these questions rhetorically, or as an indirect way to say "What a load of crap."
But I do worry that the "person" here is not a real thing at all, not someone you could meet, or could be, but a fiction. For a direct comparison: I never studied economics in school, and the sort of stuff I would gather from the news was the usual macro-economic guesswork that economists provide journalists. When I first glanced at economic theory, I was genuinely surprised that an enormous amount of economics is not empirical at all, but pure theory. (And it turns out many economists noticed the same thing and decided that maybe they should try doing actual research.) And famously much of that theory revolves around a fictional being called homo economicus. Which is not to say it's useless ? it's a model, an idealization, and interesting and useful in the ways such things are. But it's not descriptive of the behavior of human beings under scarcity, or of human beings making decisions under uncertainty. For that, you have to do actual research.
Look how confidently Wallace uses the indicative: rational self-governance brings into being, it integrates; a unified person is more real, is present, and so on. Are these observations or stipulations?
A great deal of the history of philosophy makes it into your post in one way or another, and I envy your command of the tradition. But is any of what you quote or analyze based on anything at all like research? And if not, what kind of knowledge is this?
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
If you reach such conclusions by reason alone, do you not worry that it all just hangs in the air, that it's like an economics theorem circa 1950, true within the game being played, but without any empirical grounding and without the genuine possibility of any practical application?
Do you see how the motion of the last train car has more dependencies than that of the first (engine) car?
:D
Well, that takes down my theory. Is it really less real if we already have two threads discussing the curiosity?
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
But this is a better rendition.
I'm thinking now that it's not beliefs relative to states of affairs, as categories, that admits of degrees of reality.
But rather beliefs, relative to one another with respect to reality that admits of degrees of reality. Which makes some sense to me -- I have true and false beliefs, and beliefs which implicate sets of beliefs, and the beliefs which implicate sets of beliefs which have more true statements are the beliefs with "more reality".
Almost literally.Quoting Srap Tasmaner
And I agree with you that this phenomena is related but different. I wanted to wait until I watched the movie before responding, hence my tardiness.
The slip between fantasy and reality seems to make sense of reality as degrees -- are we playing a part in our imaginative game together right now, or are we talking about the bills?
So now you have real, existing and being. A proper muddle.
Of course it is. An animal is just a way for red blood cells to make more red blood cells. The telos of red blood cells is to keep the other cells of the body going so that they can reproduce and make more red blood cells...
Telos is a rather slippery notion. That's why it dropped out of use.
What's with the unattributed quotes and references?
Nonsense, the central argument of the Metaphysics is quite simple: "being qua being is being per se in accordance with the categories, which in turn is primary ousia, but primary ousia is form/edios, while form/eidos is quiddity and quiddity is actuality." QED. :grin:
But in all seriousness, it isn't that much of a muddle, Aristotle uses lots of concrete examples and spends a lot of time on definitions.
Has it? It's used all over economics, pol sci, and other social sciences, e.g. the notion of "utility." It's all over organizational psychology, or other areas of psychology. It's used in biology in the form of "teleonomy" and "function." It's used everywhere in medicine and public health. It even shows up in the pedagogy of physics in the way that the properties of end states make them more likely (sometimes to the point of being, for all intents and purposes, determined) to occur. Even more reductionist biologists like Dawkins feel the need to rely on the idea (e.g. "archeo vs. neo purpose).
As the biologist J. B. S. Haldane observed: "Teleology is like a mistress to a biologist: he cannot live without her but he's unwilling to be seen with her in public."
I think Etienne Gilson has the right of it when he says that "teleology" is to "astrology" as "teleonomy" and related terms are to "astronomy." In both cases both sets of terms develop out of the same history, and come with a lot of baggage (particularly because of the way the literary tradition used to be blended with the philosophical/scientific tradition). The new terms (astronomy and teleonomy) serve to try to separate that baggage (with disagreement over what counts as useless baggage in the latter case).
Like I said, those are my notes.
There are a lot of related ideas in psychology, e.g. "self-actualization," or "individuation." "We might consider the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl's "logotherapy" as well, humanistic psychology, and a whole range of similar movements. These have been subject to empirical study, in a variety of formats, although "therapy for mental illness" would probably be the most common lens. And the connection to the philosophical tradition is often explicit. For instance, when Martin Seligman was head of the APA he pushed "positive psychology" (also quite popular) in a context that drew heavily on the Aristotelian tradition to define the program.
"Is there empirical support for Plato's thesis here?" is probably a question that is way too broad for useful analysis. A lot of traditions/movements in psychology (both therapeutic and research based) have drawn on the wider philosophical tradition, but you're not going to be able to generate a metanalysis that cuts across all of them that will be worth its salt because the way the question has been instrumentalized and investigated are too disparate.
You could break the question up though. For instance, we could ask about Aristotle's thesis that the virtues (and vices) can be trained and are properly thought of as habits (habits we nonetheless are born with or without talents for). I think the empirical case for this is quite strong, and indeed empirically informed "self-help" literature by psychologists in this area often name drops old Aristotle.
You might find this New Yorker article on philosophers doing therapy interesting. A key difference would be the consideration of how "what one ought to do is addressed." I don't know of empirical work on this sort of therapy. The article mentions success stories, and also the opinion of some psychologists that this work wouldn't work for people with severe mental illnesses. That sort of goes along with a lot of the philosophy though; there is a certain level of stability and unity that is a prerequisite for fruitful inquiry.
On the metaphysical side, there is an entire interdisciplinary field dedicated to self-organizing systems, and a great deal of crossover between homeostasis and "staying-at-work-being-itself," or other frameworks from the literature of dissipative systems. This literature also references Aristotle a lot. For instance, in Terrance Deacon's Incomplete Nature, an attempt to derive teleonomy from statistical mechanics, gets framed in Aristotelian terms.
But I also think it's important to keep in mind what empirical research can and can't do vis-a-vis these sorts of questions, particularly empirical research housed in a scientific apparatus that generally tends to either discourage metaphysics, or at least tries to keep it separated from your day-to-day scientific work. We can point to empirical studies to support metaphysical claims, just as Plato, St. Thomas, etc. often use everyday examples or examples drawn from technical professions, but it's going to often be impossible to run experiments on such suppositions.
If metaphysics is rightly above mathematics as the most abstract and most general science (the claim of Aristotle, Boethius, St. Thomas, etc.), then asking for experimental results is more akin to asking for an experiment to prove mathematical propositions. To be sure, we can demonstrate that some numbers are prime, or the rules of arithmetic, by using rocks and apples. We can use examples from the senses. And if our mathematics is diverging wildly from our observations, we might think we have something wrong on that side of the house. Yet I do not think we can justify metaphysics on empirical grounds, in the same way you wouldn't justify Lagrange's four-square theorem or the Pythagorean theorem by showing that it works in enough randomly selected examples to hit some p value threshold. At best you can falsify metaphysical claims.
I'm not really interested in what Aristotle said, so much as what he argued. That is, that Aristotle said this or that doesn't carry much weight for me.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Hand waving at Hofstadter doesn't help much, either.
Seems to me that hierarchies of being are based on essentialism, a notion that we are better off without. But my point here is that saying something is more complex is different to saying it is of greater worth.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
You can? How on earth does that work without presupposing the very thing which makes falsification intelligible?
Ok. I don't know of anyone who has advocated such a position.
We might be differing on what is considered a metaphysical claim. I am thinking of things like Empedocles' claim that everything is made of different arrangements of earth, water, air, and fire, mixing according to the principles of love and strife. Or Thales claim that water is the principle of all things.
"Water is an undividable primitive" is the sort of supposition that is open to empirical investigation. No doubt, we could easily reformulate these models (or something like them) using new, ever smaller primitive elements, as materialists did. In some sense, they are unfalsifiable in that we can always posit ever smaller building blocks at work in a "building block ontology," but we might have other empirically informed grounds to reject such a view.
Granted, people could also reject the grounds for thinking that water is a composite substance, but I am thinking in terms of what most people are generally going to accept.
When people hold up the surfeit of apparently purposeless suffering in the world as a counter argument to metaphysical optimism they are making a similar sort of argument, and I don't think these arguments are implausible.
Yep. :up: Also logic, for those who don't think it is mere symbol manipulation.
That's a lot to chew on, thank you.
Curious then that murder charges apply only to the killing of humans. Although that may be an inadvertent illustration of the consequences of a flattened ontology.
Quoting mcdoodle
I hadn't thought of it that way, although now you mention it, it is quite an effective analogy. Have you noticed the Aeon essay I posted a good while back on 'the blind spot of science'? It can be found here and has since been published as a book.)
I was hoping you'd introduce Wallace to the conversation. Overall, agree with your analysis.
Yas, saying some thing is human is different to saying humans are worth not killing. Can you set out why you think this problematic?
Folk only advocate it until it is pointed out. Then they drop it.
Quoting Wayfarer
It feels like the Wild West. Or that movie, Everything Everywhere All at Once.
Do they? Who? It's a bizarre claim. The Wermacht and bubonic plague were both complex for instance.
I didn't know it was Descartes. I used to think it was some bloke on a bank note of some country. It seems then, images alone cannot become knowledge. Image needs the corresponding ideas or concepts to be qualified as knowledge.
When ideas and concepts alone are perceived, it is also not clear knowledge. The supplementary images for the idea or concept would help for forming more realistic knowledge.
Even then, after knowing the bloke in the avatar is Descartes, I don't know much about the real Descartes. It will be a gradual process to have more degree of real knowledge about him, if I keep reading on Descartes through time.
I quite agree. But I think the fact that this happens, in relation to this topic, speaks to the topic.
Recall that in After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre introduces an imaginative analogy to help frame his critique of modern moral philosophy. He asks us to imagine a scenario where civilization collapses and, as a result, all scientific knowledge is largely destroyed. In this hypothetical world, fragments of scientific knowledge remainbits of scientific vocabulary, isolated experimental results, and pieces of theoriesbut these fragments are disconnected from the larger framework of scientific principles and practices that once gave them meaning.
The survivors, lacking the overarching context, attempt to reconstruct science using these remnants. However, without understanding the systematic methodology or philosophical underpinnings that unified these fragments into a coherent whole in the first place, their efforts result in a distorted and fragmented picture. MacIntyre uses this scenario as an analogy for the current state of moral philosophy: he argues that modern moral discourse is similarly fragmented because it has lost its connection to the broader, historically embedded frameworks (like Aristotelian virtue ethics) that once provided coherence.
Along similar lines, in Edwin Abbott's 'Flatland', a two-dimensional surface (like a plane) is trying to comprehend a three-dimensional objecta coneas it passes through it. Since the surface only comprehends two dimensions, it would perceive the cone not as a unified three-dimensional shape but as a series of two-dimensional cross-sections. If the cone's point passes through the plane first, it would begin as a single point; as more of the cone moves through, the plane would perceive this as a gradually expanding circle; and eventually, as the cone narrows again, the circle would shrink until it disappears. From the perspective of the two-dimensional plane, these changing shapes (points, circles, ellipses) seem unrelated and fragmented, because the surface cannot grasp the unifying structure of the cone as a whole.
The very fact that the discussion has tended to lurch chaotically between substance theories, Platonic hierarchies, metaethics, and anthropology suggests a lack of shared principles to anchor the conversation - which is evidence of the problem, that we are like the two-dimensional inhabitants of Flatland, trying to comprehend concepts (like degrees of being) that inhere in a higher-dimensional metaphysical framework. There's no common reference within which the idea of degrees of reality can even be discussed.
Maybe it's related to Hegel's idea of partial truths, or Rumi's "magnificent lie.". This implies a higher truth, or something more real, but that's just poetry for it.
I read that book a million years ago and forgot he does this. Does he mention that this whole scenario is borrowed from A Canticle for Leibowitz?
But, so what?
Just wondered. Canticle is brilliant, yes.
Btw, it was started to give you a platform for explicitly discussing and defending an idea you often mention in passing, an idea you feel is often rejected out of hand.
The further purpose was to specifically not reject the idea out of hand and encourage others not to, and to set an example by trying to make sense of an idea I don't naturally have much affinity for, in my own clumsy way, of course.
Quoting Leontiskos
Don't tempt me. I'll start a thread in your honor next.
MacIntyre discusses [I]Canticle[/I] at length in the opening, and I always thought [I]Canticle[/I] itself was supposed to be a metaphor for the collapse of the Roman Empire and the preservation of knowledge by monastics (based on what I know about it, I haven't made it around to that one yet). Also, it had been fairly common to see the work of Dark Age scholars as "corruptions" of the original thought (which had been helpfully "recovered" in the Enlightenment move to "reboot" philosophy).
I think scholarship increasingly tends to reject this "corruption" thesis, recognizing that works in this era, e.g. Eriugena's [I]Periphyseaon[/I], represent significant, novel shifts in philosophy, rather then the old "reason enthralled to backwards Christianity," meme (which also makes no sense because wider advances in the Orthodox and Muslim East overlap the Latin Dark Age slump.)
This is sort of relevant to MacIntyre's thesis though because, not only did the Enlightenment jettison prior ethical theory, but it also ripped up the metaphysics it grew out of, essentially "starting over" (explicitly in Descartes' theory for instance). At the same time, philosophy was radically democratized and moved away from being largely the domain of highly trained specialists, with most living ascetic and contemplative lives, to becoming more the arena of anyone with the means to write. Then, the printing press and pamphlet sales becoming a measure/means of success further democratized things. And you can see this in some pretty famous Enlightenment texts, for instance when Hume dives into philosophy of religion while being seemingly ignorant of why assuming the univocity of being might be problematic, or at the very least question begging.
Point being, I think you could expand MacIntyre's thesis outside of ethics, and this would explain why so much contemporary philosophy has involved the recovery or rediscovery of old ideas from the "lost period" (e.g. semiotics, phenomenology, group minds, etc.).
Charles Taylor's "A Secular Age," is an interesting supplement to MacIntyre's because it shows how much of these changes were also theologically motivated, even though these changes then work themselves into major atheist thinkers (e.g. Nietzsche's German Protestant background comes through strong). For example, you cannot have an ethics of virtue (excellences) if man is totally depraved and is only ever good through miraculous grace. Nor can you have much of a [I]philosophy[/I] of ethics if true Goodness, God's Goodness, is cut off from our own notions of goodness by total equivocity, hence you focus on rules instead, first drawn from the Bible, and only later for "all rational agents."
Oh, I do. I was trained in classical music theory, and the assumption that complexity equates to quality was nearly unquestioned. Why is Bach better than Telemann? More complex. Why is the Western classical tradition better than pop? More complex. Etc. The heck of it is, there's something to this. Complexity is a virtue, it's just not the only virtue. And whether it is important to a particular piece of music depends on the aesthetic purposes of the piece. But when someone says, "I just can't find anything of worth in Beyonce, it's too simple, I listen once and there's nothing more to hear," they're not saying something silly. IMO, anyway.
I think After Virtue is essential reading, but here again we see that one person's "history of philosophy" is another's "tendentious sour-cherry-picking." Here's a rephrasing and expansion of your (accurate) summary of one of MacIntyre's main points:
"There is no such thing as a single "modern moral discourse"; rather, ethics and moral philosophy have branched out in several interesting and important directions, each with their own problems for discussion both internally and with other branches. This branching-out no longer reveals a single direct connection to broader, historically embedded frameworks (like Aristotelian virtue ethics) that once provided a systematic view of ethics, along with the meta-ethical claim that the view could not be challenged without challenging an entire philosophical system. A number of branches of modern moral philosophy call this into question."
Is this version any more accurate than MacIntyre's? I think it is, but I wouldn't completely endorse either one. My point is that we shouldn't be beguiled by the idea that a loss of connection with a particular older tradition renders the entire discipline incoherent. Make Philosophy Great Again? I don't think so.
There are a two main strands to the thread, and this isn't one of them. Which is fine, I was just spitballing.
I still find it interesting that ordinary people routinely think truth can land on a spectrum, that there can be more or less truth in what you say.
And in a similar way people describe ideas, accounts, views, as more realistic or less, on a spectrum like accuracy (which @fdrake brought up).
I find that sort of thing awfully interesting, but this thread is about what sort of existence properties have, whether things that have more property-types have more existence, and whether there's a truer realm beyond this one.
!
What?! My wonderings are off-topic? Never! :D
Good and interesting thread either way. I'm enjoying it.
:up:
I suppose I was thinking in terms of metaphysics and a more general notion of goodness. You know, a plague spore would be "better" than a prion, or a hurricane "better" than a rock.
I don't think this is MacIntyre's point. He goes into great detail on why he thinks the collapse into emotivism happens with a series of case studies. The thesis isn't that "only the classical tradition is coherent and so moving away from it results in incoherence." Rather it is "these developments led to incoherence because of x, y, and z (with particular attention to and affirmation of Nietzsche's critiques of ethics)," but these problems do not apply to the tradition.
But then the sub-thesis is that the abandonment of the tradition has helped lead to this incoherence precisely because our moral vocabulary was developed in the context of the old tradition, and we continue to lean on this vocabulary even when it has been uprooted from the context where it makes sense. For example, he talks about equivocation in lists of the virtues in philosophers, but also in Jane Austen, Benjamin Franklin, etc., and the further equivocation as vice becomes the "vices" of the "vice unit" (i.e. primarily prostitution, gambling, drugs, and alcohol) and virtue becomes a sexually loaded term for women.
I think it's a very similar to the arguments that Deely makes in "Four Ages of Understanding," and the "Red Book," re the shift in epistemology, the philosophy of perception, and semiotics in the early modern period and on. The claims are similar; terms like "objective" and "subjective" come to take on meanings that are in some ways the opposite of their original meaning and which lead to incoherence [I]because[/I] their original framework has been not only abandoned, but forgotten. Some parts might be stronger than others; Deely seems to be on particularly solid ground on the points relating specifically to the philosophy of signs and signification.
I think you could probably write a similar book about metaphysics and terms like "substance."
Such historical arguments can of course be biased or oversimplifying, and they become less plausible when they rely significantly on relatively recent "new readings" of old thought.
Heidegger makes this sort of argument going way back with the "ontotheology" thing, and I think that, even if it fails as a historical piece, we might consider that it applies to much philosophy, if not all the philosophy he thought it applied to. Gadamer has a pretty good critique of why Heidegger's history might be thought to fail a bit (basically, it assumed that the late scholasticism with which Heidegger was most familiare.g. Suarezwas representative of all scholasticism or even the whole of "classical metaphysics," but it isn't really.)
Then you have your out and out polemics, such as Weaver's "Ideas Have Consequences." These can still have value, but tend to run into much more simplification and bias. Another example here might be the many attempts to frame Aristotle and Plato as essentially representing the empirical/rationalist (Anglo/Continental) divide, when they really don't fit these neatly at all.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Sure, that's exactly what they are -- equivocations, with a highly political purpose. But incoherent? I don't feel I have any trouble understanding the competing meanings of a term like "vice," nor do I think it affect my ability to engage in ethical thinking that is independent of the Aristotelian framework.
The irony here, for me, is that I actually rely more on virtue ethics than any other semi-systematic theory. I just don't feel it needs the kind of support MacIntyre wants to give it.
This is the vision of cultural transmission as a game of "telephone". @Wayfarer frequently makes such suggestions.
Two questions though:
(1) Is the original message necessarily the most important? (Dewey, for a counterpoint, talks about philosophical problems not being solved but abandoned, passed by, because they are no longer "live" to later generations.) The word "necessarily" provides an easy out; make it, why should we think the original is important at all, except as a matter of historical interest?
(2) How much time-place-language-conceptual-scheme-culture relativism are we committed to? Just enough that certain people "no longer understand" the old ways, but not so much that the dedicated scholar can't "recover" or "reconstruct" what has been lost?
(2) is particularly "fraught," as the kids say. When you dip into such a debate, you'll first read someone claiming that the original meaning of such and such was this, because in their conceptual scheme blah blah blah. And you think, wow that's really interesting, and the shift in perspective is exciting. But then you find out that every little detail is subject to endless debate among specialists, and it gets harder to believe anyone really knows the "original". -- And all that comes before considering whether you're even capable of entering into the worldview of a thousand or three thousand years ago, given a mind stuffed with 20th- and 21st-century ideas. How alien are the ideas you're supposed to be able to grasp? How can you know you've done so, that you haven't just played another round of "telephone"?
I think you might be misjudging the sense in which these terms become "incoherent." MacIntyre does take a very broad approach, which has some deficiencies, but his paradigmatic criticism of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment ethics is Nietzsche, whose attack on ethics is particularly broad, but which has also generally been accepted as applying broadly (i.e., a serious challenge, even if it can be overcome).
He is not claiming that all modern ethicists are emotivists. This would be a silly thing to try to argue, because of all the counter examples that exist. He is claiming that the emotivists, or those reducing ethics to power, etc., actually have very strong arguments vis-á-vis contemporary ethics. It is indeed a weakness of the book that it doesn't really get into these critiques as much as one might hope. I don't think MacIntyre initially imagined how popular it would become, and probably figured people would be familiar with the references. But then another feature of modern ethical debate he focuses on to make his point is the inability of people to agree on almost any principles, and how this differs from earlier thought
In terms of contemporary thought, he looks to the analytic tradition a bit, focusing on Moore for a while, but since he was a Marxist, Marxism comes in for particular critique. The contemporary example he uses towards the end of the book is how the debate between partisans of Rawls and Nozick is interminable because of the historical issues he traces through Hume, Kant, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche.
I think Charles Taylor's "A Secular Age," is a useful corrective here because of the dominance of what Taylor calls "subtraction narratives" of the emergence of secularism. These basically say: "We inherited all sorts of maladaptive, superstitious dogmas. Secularism is just what emerges when you cut all that garbage out." Taylor's main point is that this is a false narrative. Secularism was positively constructed, and in particular it was positively constructed on religious grounds in a theologically informed context. This is relevant to the idea that the problems of modern ethicstheir shape and structurewere in some way inevitable once the "historical baggage weighing us down" was jettisoned. But the book also takes a broader look at how notions of human flourishing evolved in ways that make doing ethics difficult.
I think there's a real question whether supposed views of the past are ever really in play in a contemporary debate, or are people staking out contemporary positions in that debate but using the past to give their position the lustre of authority.
Or, on the other hand, to associate the position you oppose with the past well lost.
I think, rather, what makes us unique is the reason the charge of murder applies uniquely to us.
In that case, my difficulty with the OP is that we are trying to get degrees out of the substance/mode binary. Maybe that can be done, but at face value it is implausible. Unless there are only two degrees.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
And I appreciate that, too.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Okay.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
:grimace:
Really, though, I've been egging you on to start a thread on logical pragmatism for awhile now. I am willing to oppose that, and you also have a stake in it.
What's in it for me? (See what I did there?)
Which btw I didn't see coming. I think that comes from @Wayfarer's stuff about the 17th century.
True enough. But I wonder if some of the oddities coming out of quantum theory might lie in that nebulous zone between the two extremes. My thoughts range from virtual incredulity at action at a distance to speculating that somehow mathematics materializes in a strange way.
Which brings up a question. How is logic related to definitions of reality?
Which, recall, originated in the discussion about whether and in what sense philosophy can be considered "higher" (and why the scare quotes around the term.) Which then leads to the question, along what axis, what dimension, is that distinction meaningful? Higher in what sense? So, rummaging through my grab-bag of things I've read, that statement about degrees of reality in Liebniz et al came to mind: 'the less dependent a thing is on other things for its existence, the more real it is'. That maps against my hazy conception of 'the unconditioned' as the domain of absolute truth.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Like 'folk wisdom'? I'll own up that one of the books that considerably influenced me was Alan Watts' last book - The Book: On the Taboo against Knowing Who You Are. Later there were other books in popular Vedanta - Vivekananda, Yogananda and Ramana (and let's not forget The Beatles). They are strictly speaking outside the bounds of philosophy proper, at any rate, outside the Western philosophical corpus. But they have the distinct advantage of still being a living philosophy, propagated by living adherents, not confined solely to glass museum cases or library shelves. And I also think they're a strong implicit influence in much of contemporary discussion about philosophy of mind and consciousness.
Anyway, that's where I think the idea of self-realisation comes from. And the salient idea there is indeed that that of a 'truer realm', which is what 'the sage' has come to realise (in both senses of understanding to be true and bringing to fruition.)
But that sits awkwardly against talk of 'what property-types have more existence'. Nevertheless I think it's the implicit background for the idea expressed in the 'great chain of being', which is where this started.
Even in pre-modern western philosophy the outlines of similar ideas can be discerned - like one of those satellite photos where archaeologists can make out the outlines of an ancient city which is no longer visible on the ground. The hoi polloi, the ordinary man (i.e. you and I) is distracted by passions and petty concerns, bickering over opinions and thirsting after pleasures. Through the philosophical ascent we 'come to our senses', as it were, and begin to 'see truly'. (I notice that one of the interesting cross-cultural scholars I read, Raymond Panikkar, did one of his three PhD's on a comparative study of Thomas Aquinas and ?di ?a?kara.)
Quoting J
I think the fragmentation and pluralism of today's world is necessary and inevitable. It's a consequence of the globalisation of knowledge and culture. Another of the Eastern philosophy books that impressed me was subtitled 'seeking truth in a time of chaos'.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
From a very high level of description, isnt what happened, in the aftermath of Descartes division of mind and matter, that res cogitans was to become rejected as an oxymoronic conception, a spiritual substance, a ghost in the machine? Leaving the other half of his dualist model, extended matter, which proved so amenable to prediction, control and manipulation through the emerging new mathematical physics, that it came to be seen as the only real? And that is what finally precipitates the loss of the vertical dimension and with it the hierarchy of values. What is of value then becomes a matter for the individual conscience.
My oldest son and his friends have read it, along with Nietzsche, Marx, Camus. The hippy reading list is alive and well in some quarters.
Quoting Wayfarer
Quoting Wayfarer
Quoting Wayfarer
I think you're right to see all these dots as connected, and right to think people reject the whole package because they reject a particular dot, for they see them as connected too.
I think we should have a conversation about the truer realm, because that intuition -- that this world isn't all there is -- is so persistent across cultures and ages. In the modern world, we've mostly corraled it into religion, but the intuition itself is interesting.
So here let me ask you: my hunch is that this intuition, that there's something else, something more, comes first and beliefs about the other realm after. Do you think that's right? Or do you think that people, maybe a smallish number, have experiences that are, well, unusual, that they take as experiences of another realm -- that such experience comes first? I could see either. What do you think?
You're on the mark with the observation about it having been 'corraled into religion'. That is why there is a taboo about this subject. But then, for a lot of European history, the consequences of challenging ecclesiastical orthodoxy were extremely serious. 'Orthodoxy' means 'right worship' or 'right belief', and the penalties for straying were severe. This has left a kind of shadow, something like a repressed memory, in the European consciousness, which affects much of what is said and thought about it.
About there being other realms, I would say cautiously yes. But there is a principle in Mah?y?na, that Nirv??a and Sa?s?ra are not separate realms, but the same realm viewed with different eyes. Through the lens of clinging and aversion, the world is fragmented and suffering (dukkha). Through the lens of insight the same world is seen as interdependent, luminous, and spontaneous. Not that this is easy to realise in practice, and popular presentations of Eastern wisdom have often turned out to be another means of self-deception or ways to exploit the gullible. But it retains a kernel of truth.
I think there is such a thing as revelation in the sense of an intuitive vision or insight into the real nature of existence, and that the Buddha did possess such an insight, which is why (perhaps contrary to secular interpretations) his was a revealed religion. There are others as well (Parmenides comes to mind), but notice in Buddhism the emphasis on insight, as opposed to belief, which is why the first article on the eightfold path is 'right view', a subtly different thing to 'right belief'.
Anyway enough of a digression into points East, but that explains a bit about why I came at the question from the angle I did.
I like this.
Quoting Wayfarer
That certainly has the ring of truth!
It does also sound like the sort of difference that you might attribute to affect or mood.
But that can go either way: you could also say that your mood derives from "which world" you're seeing.
Quoting Wayfarer
There's just too much literature on all this for us to do more than scratch the surface.
I'll add something else, which is a little closer to your point about self-realization. There's another sort of insight which maybe concerns something like freedom. I've acquired a sort of homegrown Buddhism: when I'm worried about something (and there is so much to worry about), I tell myself "This is just a thing that is happening" and I can let go of the feelings I attach to those worries. I tell my son, "You gotta be Taoist about this shit." -- Henry Miller used to talk about being a happy rock, that the river flows over but cannot move or change.
Another possibility: Some (not all) of those who make arguments using the past, want to persuade us of a narrative in which society (almost always Western society) as a whole has gone down the tubes since whatever the Golden Age was supposed to be. In this version, the decline in philosophy doesn't stand on its own, but is part and parcel of a decline in values, culture, and spirituality. We're meant to see the latter sorts of decline as obvious ("Just look around!"), and infer from this that the older philosophy must have been better too. We might even see a causal connection. I suppose if you have a grand narrative in which the West has declined, this doesn't fit well with a belief that philosophy has progressed, or at least not gotten worse.
Absolutely. And it can go the other way -- you can guilt-by-association traditional philosophy, art, religion, anything of the past if you think society is so much better now than it was in the bad old days.
I should add, I don't think it's a matter of "reducing" someone's philosophy to their politics, or their aesthetics, or vice versa. But I do believe William James was right to sense that there were different temperaments, I guess we could say, and that attitudes toward various things tend to come in clusters. Or if not temperaments then styles, different ways of approaching things, of defining and trying to solve problems.
Quite! And very pleased to have established some rapport.
Yes. One of those other ways is what some call "whiggish" -- when we make moral judgments about people in the past as if they should have had the same (obviously correct!) attitudes we have today, in our enlightened age.
Eastern mystical practices, like Zen, revolve about experiences of enlightenment rather than philosophical discussions. Although enlightenment may be ineffable, it would help if more responses on the site were about personal experiences than speculations and searching out what the Greek ancients had to say. I realize this goes against the grain of this site, and that also there may be very few instances of personal revelations, but the discussion is getting nowhere with regard to its title. However, if this is OK with the few participants, and digressions are acceptable, I stand down and watch. Just my opinion.
As a child, I was convinced that there's something behind the world I can see, as if it's all a veil and whatever is behind it is "more real.". When I later came across Plato's allegory of the cave, I was a little shocked because it seemed so familiar.
I can't avoid reading my childish ideas into Plato and all the other philosophers who seem to echo the same thing. At this stage I think "more real" is a metaphor.
Not longer afterwards, probably mid- to late twenties, is when I started to read popular Eastern mysticism - Teachings of Ramana Maharishi, Autobiography of a Yogi (which Steve Jobs had distributed at his funeral, by the way) and Krishnamurti Reader. Alan Watts Way of Zen, D T Suzuki - all popular authors in the late 60's and early 70's. At that time, there were still Adyar Bookstores, long since drowned by the Amazon, but they smelt of sandalwood and had heaving bookshelves of these materials.
The best overall book I ever bought from Adyar was To Meet the Real Dragon, by Nishijima-roshi. I did endeavour to practice zazen along Buddhist lines for a long period, from around mid 2000's until about 4 years ago, but it's fallen away, and it's a hard row to hoe. Self-mastery was never a strong suit. (I am endeavouring to re-start that practice, but, you know, road to hell paved with good intentions...)
Anyway, that's a bit of autobio on the topic, but I'm also reminded, by your 'spectrum of reality' remark, of Ken Wilber's first book, 1977, Spectrum of Consciousness, which was very much about this. But then, millions of people are going through these states and stages at this point in history, as mythologised in Age of Aquarius and other new-age sources.
Point 1 totally depends on the ideas in question. Deely for instance is making a case for a particular sort of answer to the epistemic issues that have plagued modern philosophy. He thinks he has found the solution, which his why he markets C.S. Peirce (his principle inspiration) as the first truly "post-modern" thinker. A lot of his work doesn't rely on the historical framing. Nonetheless, the historical framing is crucial to his project in that he is trying to get other people to see the value in the fairly obscure and technical work of late Scholasticism (e.g. thinkers like John of St. Thomas).
Like I said, I think we can affirm a "better reading" as "better," even if cases where we think it diverges from the author's intent. For instance, I like Robert Wallace and Gary Dorien's "Hegels" more, but I am not convinced that they are truer to the text/intent than other readings. Likewise, someone with a view like Popper's might buy into Rosen's view of the Republic even if they remain skeptical that everyone around Plato misread him.
For the second and third points, I think it just depends. On some of the more radical readings of Wittgenstein in the direction of the "conceptual relativism" thesis, you can't really communicate across time and space. It seems fair to me to discount this as implausible and pursue a sensible via media here.
And it varies by topic. "Reconstructing what Christ's disciples thought of Jesus while he was still alive?" Probably impossible. But "we cannot know," isn't selling and books. "What did Kant think about his potential dualism problem and how folks like Fichte would end up reading and extending his work?" We can grapple with that a lot better because his correspondence records his thoughts on just this "problem." There are trickier middle grounds. For example, might be worth trying to see if you can read Aristotle's Physics and the Metaphysics as intentionally organized pieces instead of just chalking up difficulties to the work of compilers and potential note takers or linear development in Aristotle's thought, even if the issue can't be decided decisively.
I think it's possible to find Macintyre guilty of the sin, so common in contemporary academia, of staking out a provocative and maximalist thesis as a means of grabbing the readers' attention. I don't think this trivializes his argument however. It may make things difficult for proponents of his view though, in that they either have to retranslate the thesis (hard work) or get trapped in a sort of motte and bailey argument. I mentioned Peter Redpath earlier, and he is great on some things, and his claim that "most philosophers have become sophists," is perhaps a good deal less radical once you realize what he means by it, but that's probably a more egregious example where it seems like the immediate risk is that you end up only preaching to the choir by alienating people.
But I think such arguments can be very plausible, and Deely is a great example because he spends a lot of time on a very specific area, signification and signs. It seems pretty clear that most philosophers were simply ignorant of all the work done in this area. They seem unaware of it and don't mention it in contexts where it would make a good addition to what they are saying. Locke coins the term "semiotics" while in a bit of a brainstorm on a new science of signification, and doesn't seem to be much aware of the doctrina signorum. Even modern studies often introduce Peirce as the creator of the tripartite model (1,600 years old by the time he was working with it). Wittgenstein is probably idiosyncratic in the degree to which he has a historical blind spot, but it's interesting that PI is framed in terms of a St. Augustine quote when Augustine is generally considered the "father of semiotics" and has a theory of "meaning as use" that doesn't get into view at all.
Plus, to 's concerns, we need not presuppose any sort of difficulty in understanding past work, just inattention. D.C. Schindler's two (eventually three) volume work on notions of freedom lines up very well with part of what Macintyre is saying, but the basic thesis "freedom in the modern era became defined in terms of potency, the ability to 'choose anything,' as opposed to the ability to actualize the good," and this: "A. cashes out in freedom as arbitrariness or unintelligible drives (Hegel's point); and B. radically destabilizes ethics." The point here isn't so much that people cannot understand the past, just that they haven't paid sufficient attention to it.
Cool!
Ha, I still have a copy of that from my hometown's public library that I forgot to return. I was 16 when I found a copy of Journey to Ixtlan and I was extremely taken with it. I remembered thinking, "why don't I get to have a shamanic coming of age ritual? I turned 16 and all I got to do was shoot a handgun and take driver's ed..."
I tried to find my hands in my dreams but the only time I ever did, I was sucked into a kind of deathly vortex which seemed to be a state of paralysis between waking and sleep. Lucid dreaming never worked for me, but I have always had the most vivid and bizarre dreams usually involving people I have never met and places I have never been in real life.
I believe our unconscious is always trying to tell us stuff about our lives, but it is all imagistic and hard to fathom. I have come to the conclusion that it is best to draw no ontological conclusions about such imaginative experiences, because wishful thinking is always knocking at the door and can only be a source of confusion and pseudo-knowledge.
I also spent 18 years participating in Gurdjieff groups and practiced meditation every day. This led to several powerful experiences which are impossible to describe but were, despite their short duration, as or even more compelling than my experiences with mind-manifesting substances.
I would get that too. I eventually learned that if you focus on breathing you can get back out of it.
An aside - Did you ever get anywhere with, Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson? I kicked around with people in Melbourne who were into Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. I spent a lot of time trying to follow the works. Got nowhere. Can't remember a thing 45 years later... Talk of degrees of reality. I got the feeling I needed more knowledge of the Greeks to fully appreciate Tertium Organum.
You are the closest to my mystical adventures. After reading the Art of D, which was brought to my attention by a young fellow rock climber who enjoyed a drug or two, I made the attempt to see my hands, as you did, but instantly I was shifted to an alternate reality - or so it seemed. Stunned, I lay there for a minute or so then got out of bed and walked across the bedroom floor to a closed door, feeling the carpet under my feet and stroking a chest of drawers on the way. I had heard of people walking through closed doors so I gave it a try and it was like going through a thin layer of fog. On the other side a stairwell led down to the living room, and as I started down I was pulled back to normal reality. Later I learned that moving down in that state can result in losing it.
Other adventures followed, and in each I was fully conscious but enabled to violate the laws of physics. How would I describe it in a few words? I was pure will.
I also never got very far with Beelzebub's Tales to this Grandson. Gurdjieff's other books were more comprehensible to me, and Ouspensky's were that much clearer again. As I understood it the idea was that higher states of consciousness/ being consisted in higher or "finer" 'vibrations' of energy. As I remember it, according to Ouspensky (explicating Gurdjieff of course) everything has a material reality, even God and the human soul with the difference between "brute' or 'dead' matter and higher states consisting in fineness of vibration, like the gradation of musical tones. Man is in the natural state, asleep, a reactive machine.
The beginning of the path on the "fourth Way" was the establishing of a 'magnetic centre'. I stayed a fair time with the school and this was largely due to the fact that I had married one of the women who was pretty much totally committed. We were not only married but together ran a successful garden design and landscaping business.
I had been struggling with my skepticism for years (the organization seemed to be becoming progressively more cult-like and I was only interested in finding ways to alter my consciousness without continuing to resort to psychotropics) and when I finally could continue no longer my wife could not accept that I was going to leave and our marriage fell apart.
What you recount here is fascinating to me and makes me wish I had tried harder with or been more naturally talented in lucid dreaming. As I said I have always had very strange dreams, but I have never experienced exercising my will in dreaming. I did experiment with writing whatever i could remember of my dreams on waking, and I found the more I practiced this the more I could remember.
I always wondered though whether I was recording genuine memories of all the details (which became very elaborate) of these dreams or whether a good part what I wrote was not fabricated after the fact. The thought occurred to me that In way it doesn't matter because in either case I would be mining the unconscious.
I woke up in a dream once, but I changed something that went against the integrity of the dream reality and I immediately woke up. That never happened again.
When I got sucked into the limbo state was when I was doing that meditation where you ask "Who am I"? I never did that again, but sometimes I could feel the limbo coming. I discovered that if you focus on breathing, it goes away.
The AofD experiences I had 40 or so years ago were astounding in several ways, the most pronounced being a wakening into a world more vivid and "real" than normal. As I mentioned I felt I was pure will, but the colors and definitions seemed stronger also. One experience was awakening in a bright desert staring at a large extremely colorful cactus. I moved around it and saw into it from several positions, astounded at the sharpness of definition and brilliancy.
A couple of years ago I suddenly awoke into a world where I was a different person, living in an Irish cottage, looking out a window at a countryside. For a brief few moments I had the sensations, memories and feelings of someone else. Another ineffable encounter with an alternate reality. It was quickly over.
I can't explain why these things happened to me so easily. I was a mathematician and an experienced rock climber - which are not so disjoint as you might suspect.
The "I AM" is the pure will behind the shadows of ourselves.
Trouble with identity again. The argument against reincarnation seems applicable here - in what sense was the person in the Irish Cottage the same as @jgill? If all they shared was 'I AM', how do we conclude that they are the same? Or was Jgill experiencing being someone else, in which case experience is not essential to selfhood...? I don't know how to make sense of such experiences, but I don't think mystics do, either.
But also, and back to the topic, is the criteria for what is real to be that it feels real?
I don't know if that's an answerable queston.
Quoting Banno
I think that's rather simplistic. Consider as an analogy, a major life-event, either a positive or negative one. It might have an impact on your whole view of the meaning of your existence, for better or for worse. I think epiphanies are like that in some respects, although of course such things are difficult or impossible to convey to others. But it is interesting how many people will tell of such life-changing experiences if the opportunity arises.
I agree. Humans are so diverse and interesting; their out of the ordinary stories never fail to fascinate. I have experienced a few life-changing experiences, and for me their capacity to change life consists in the feelings they evoke.
I'm pretty confident it isn't.
Quoting Wayfarer
As do I. offered a rational strategy, but was dismissed rather summarily. Feels seem to be what folk want, rather than thinks. That's fine, since the thinks will only lead to aporia, which feels unsettling.
Imagine a diamond where each facet of the diamond is the whole diamond. This is Schopenhauer. Knowing that it's true, not wondering, but knowing, is part of an altered state. Think of it as a different brand of logic.
Although, the saying is: the difference between a mystic and a philosopher is that the philosopher tries to explain it. The mystic doesn't.
Trouble is distinguishing what we know from what we just believe. The difference is truth.
To me, the trouble is distinguishing a mystical state from a possible tumor. I would have to pay out of pocket for an MRI, and I have no noxious symptoms. It does make me laugh to consider that Buddha may have an aneurysm. :grin:
I've found three reactions to mystical experience
1. There's the guy who clearly describes an out of body experience, but is certain it was his brain playing tricks in him.
2. There's the guy who is sure he has the keys to understanding the universe, and won't be dissuaded.
3. There's the person who has always had it, but just lives with it without making many judgements one way or the other.
Taking up the transcendental lens:
We could conclude the 'I AM' is the same because they referred to the same 'I' who was 'AM'ing.
Quoting frank
Oh, I don't know about that. If you read up on Christian mysticism, the real blue-blood mystics such as Eckhardt and the other Rhineland mystics, they were both philosophically literate and rigorous. Eckhardt's sayings are dotted with 'an authority says' or 'according to a master' and each of those, you can have no doubt, would be a reference to a Boethius or a Dionysius or a Plotinus or some such. Mystical is, of course, the name for a whole bunch of fuzzy-sounding platitudes, but the real mystics may be both precise and rigorous.
Bernard McGinn wrote a good book on Meister Eckhart. I've never seen it spelled Eckhardt.
4. There's the person who has a mystical experience, which is life-changing and whose effects persist over time. This person isn't sure WHAT happened, but tries to pick the most likely explanation, given what they know or can learn about such experiences, coupled with their own ongoing experience of the life changes. The result is a hypothesis: that the most likely explanation is that the experience was indeed an experience of God. The person doesn't claim knowledge of this, not at all. They can be shown to be wrong, conceivably, and they know it. But like so many important things in life, we have to make our best judgment.
I think that'd count as a higher reality -- some kind of metaphysical structure which connects all the individual minds.
This isn't to say I endorse that, but it'd make sense of the idea: We could wrap the theory up as an explanation for connection between physically disparate minds.
This is interesting. Can you say more about that?
:cool: :up:
Right, and the justification will also depend on the experience(s). So, for instance, with a single experience set off by a drug or hypoxia, it is perhaps easier to write off than repetitive experiences with no obvious cause. Likewise, in some ways less utterly foreign experiences might be harder to reconcile, precisely because they fit into the model of all other justification. Recurrence and duration seem relevant.
Ezekiel's visions represent one of the more famous instances of mystical experience and, due to both linguistic evidence and his precise chronology, scholars seem to think they are relatively contemporaneous accounts. But the "hand of the Lord is upon" Ezekiel often and for long durations. At one point he is rendered immobile in episodes lasting 13 and 1 1/2 months respectively, in events scholars have supposed might be catatonic schizophrenic episodes. However, this would make Ezekiel very unique because, while many great artists have had schizophrenia, most people aren't able to carry out this sort of major literary project after the disease has manifested this extreme level of symptoms.
Anyhow, I find the Prophetic literature particularly interesting because it is so often not portrayed as a positive experience. Many of the prophets request that God kill them, with Jeremiah in particular launching into a long death wish narrative (Job also does this). Yet at the same time, none of the doubt, which does appear in the Bible, in apocryphal books, and in later Jewish, Christian, and Muslim mysticism seems to make it in either.
It was really rather a stray thought. The question was raised about how you would know if you really did momentarily experience the existence of another person in a dream state. I said it was an unanswereable question - hence aporetic, the kind of question for which there is no answer. Which has something in common with epoch?, suspension of judgement about what is not evident. But to me, the awareness of those kinds of questions, while not knowing whether or how they can be answered, signals a kind of openness to possibility. Neither ruling out the possibility nor believing it.
In the Theaetetus, aporia emerges in the dialogues examination of knowledge, where Socrates leads the participants to recognize the inadequacy of various definitions. The state of aporia isnt necessarily a paradox but rather a deliberate moment of intellectual humility or openness, signaling that more inquiry is needed.
Thats what I was getting at.
aporia
noun
apo·?ria ?-?p?r-?-?
1
: an expression of real or pretended doubt or uncertainty especially for rhetorical effect
2
: a logical impasse or contradiction
especially : a radical contradiction in the import of a text or theory that is seen in deconstruction as inevitable
I wasn't thinking of the meaning in the context of rehtorical devices, but of the second definition,
from here:
1. What the sight of our eyes tells us is to be believed.
2. Sight tells us the stick is bent.
3. What the touch of our hand tells us is to be believed.
4. Touch tells us the stick is straight. (2)
The aporia, or "apory" of this syllogism lies in the fact that, while each of these assertions is individually conceivable, together they are inconsistent or impossible (i.e. they constitute a paradox). Rescher's study is indicative of the continuing presence of scholarly examinations of the concept of aporia and, furthermore, of the continuing attempts of scholars to translate the word, to describe its modern meaning.
Quoting Wayfarer
Seems to me those questions are closely related, even intertwined.
Which questions? Incidentally, my reference to 'the passage I quoted' was actually a reference to the excerpt about Husserl that I posted in the Mind-Created World thread - I got my wires crossed between these two threads. I think discussoion of the 'mind-independence in Husserl' question ought to be in that other thread.
The questions concerning whether consciousness is part of the natural world and the question about the existence of the external world.
Albert H. Friedlander
European Judaism: A Journal for the New Europe
Vol. 27, No. 2 (Autumn 94), pp. 78-90 (13 pages)
"Eckhart" is the more common though not the only spelling.