Objectivity and Detachment | Parts One | Two | Three | Four
The current subject of many animated philosophical debates is whether we humans are able to see things as they truly are. At issue are the perennial philosophical questions: What is real? and How can we come to know it? These are questions fundamental to philosophy and science alike.
For most, it seems natural to assume that whatever the truth might be, it must be objective if it is to matter. What is objective is understood to be just so, independent of your or my or anyones ideas about it. Reality, said Philip K. Dick, is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesnt go away. This outlook naturally aligns with a scientifically-oriented society. Science, after all, is occupied with discovering and understanding the nature of objective reality, something in which enormous strides have been made since the 17th century. Accordingly it is easy to presume that to question objectivity is to be antiscientific.
Subjectivity, on the other hand, is the domain of experience and interpretation, shaped by individual minds and cultural context. While respect for the individual may be foundational to Western culture, because of the significance given to objectivity, the subjective is generally not considered when arriving at judgements of what is truly so. Allowing for the subjective, it is said, results in relativism and subjectivism what is true for you is the dismissive description.
Yet questions linger, some of them thrown up by science itself. Cognitive science has provided ample evidence for something that philosophers have long intuited, which is the way in which the brain creates or constructs what we instinctively take to be a purely objective reality meaning that we, as subjects, have a role in grounding the very objectivity that we might assume is completely independent of us. Along similar lines, philosophers of science, such as Thomas Kuhn¹ and Michael Polanyi², have demonstrated that tacit knowledge and personal perspectives shape even the most rigorous of scientific practices.
Drawing on an inter-disciplinary perspective, I will argue that objectivity, while indispensable in science, must be complemented by philosophical detachment to arrive at a greater insight into the nature of existence.
The Cartesian Division
The central role of objectivity was crucial to the emergence of early modern science, which distinguished it from the intuition-based, introspective theorizing of the medieval and ancient world. So it is not coincidental that the first uses of the word objectivity began to appear in the early 1600s.³ Objectivity in this modern sense emerged alongside Galileos new physics, and his conceptual division between the primary and secondary qualities of objects the primary being figure (or shape), size, position, motion, and quantity, while the secondary included color, taste, aroma, and sound. The secondary attributes were said to inhere in the subject, creating a division that was foundational to the emerging scientific worldview.
This division created the framework for the modern, mechanistic view of the world, which Descartes further entrenched with his separation of mind (res cogitans) and body (res extensa). This was, in turn, set against the backdrop of a universe devoid of teleology (action for a purpose). Given these background assumptions, the foundational worldview of early modern science begins to emerge: the individual ego contemplating exact ideas, in a clockwork universe driven by mechanical forces, amenable to precise description in the language of mathematics. (Notice, however, that while the individual ego may be ostensibly bracketed out in this worldview, it remains implicit as the locus of observation and measurement.)
As philosopher Thomas Nagel described it:
This is where the primacy of the objective stance begins to appear. It aims for the elimination or at least suspension of all traces of subjectivity, so as to arrive at an understanding built solely on the basis of these spatiotemporal primary qualities, those things that are objectively measurable, and believed, furthermore, to be objectively real, above and beyond any opinion or conjecture. They are what is truly there which helps us to understand why physics became paradigmatic for the scientific outlook, generally, at the outset of modernity.?
The difficulty with the strictly objectivist approach is that it leaves no room at all for the subject for us, in fact, as human beings. Viewed objectively, instead, h.sapiens is a fortuitous byproduct of the same essentially mindless process that causes the movements of the planets; were one species amongst many others. As Friedrich Nietszche foresaw, this portends nihilism, the sense that the Universe is meaningless, devoid of any purpose or value save what the individual ego is able to conjure or project. It was an intuition that the great Erwin Schrödinger was well aware of:
Of course, none of this is exactly news, there has been massive commentary over centuries of how the objective sciences rob the world of meaning. The point is, for all of its objective power, science also contains a fundamental lacuna, a gap or an absence, at its center. How, then, can we expect it reveal what is truly so? What kind of truth are we left with, if we ourselves are not part of it?
This tension between the objective stance and the role of the knowing subject raises profound questions about the real nature of existence questions that go beyond the purview of science and into the domain of philosophy. ...
---
1. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, University of Chicago Press; Fourth edition, 30 April 2012
2. Modern philosophy is characterised by a concerted rejection of tradition. In its stead rose the view Polanyi calls objectivism, a view embracing a completely detached ideal of knowledge. The Cartesian ideal of achieving a Gods eye view (what Descartes calls The Archimedean Point), from which to survey all objects of knowledge independently of prior assumptions, is an impossible (and ultimately harmful) dream. (Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, cited in Mark T. Mitchell, Michael Polanyi: The Art of Knowing.)
3. https://www.etymonline.com/word/objective
4. Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False, Oxford University Press, 2012, Pp35-36
5. Subject of another of Thomas Nagels books, The View from Nowhere, OUP, 1986
6. Erwin Schrodinger, Nature and the Greeks, Cambridge University Press, 1996
Extracted from Scientific Objectivity and Philosophical Detachment (Medium)
...to be continued
For most, it seems natural to assume that whatever the truth might be, it must be objective if it is to matter. What is objective is understood to be just so, independent of your or my or anyones ideas about it. Reality, said Philip K. Dick, is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesnt go away. This outlook naturally aligns with a scientifically-oriented society. Science, after all, is occupied with discovering and understanding the nature of objective reality, something in which enormous strides have been made since the 17th century. Accordingly it is easy to presume that to question objectivity is to be antiscientific.
Subjectivity, on the other hand, is the domain of experience and interpretation, shaped by individual minds and cultural context. While respect for the individual may be foundational to Western culture, because of the significance given to objectivity, the subjective is generally not considered when arriving at judgements of what is truly so. Allowing for the subjective, it is said, results in relativism and subjectivism what is true for you is the dismissive description.
Yet questions linger, some of them thrown up by science itself. Cognitive science has provided ample evidence for something that philosophers have long intuited, which is the way in which the brain creates or constructs what we instinctively take to be a purely objective reality meaning that we, as subjects, have a role in grounding the very objectivity that we might assume is completely independent of us. Along similar lines, philosophers of science, such as Thomas Kuhn¹ and Michael Polanyi², have demonstrated that tacit knowledge and personal perspectives shape even the most rigorous of scientific practices.
Drawing on an inter-disciplinary perspective, I will argue that objectivity, while indispensable in science, must be complemented by philosophical detachment to arrive at a greater insight into the nature of existence.
The Cartesian Division
The central role of objectivity was crucial to the emergence of early modern science, which distinguished it from the intuition-based, introspective theorizing of the medieval and ancient world. So it is not coincidental that the first uses of the word objectivity began to appear in the early 1600s.³ Objectivity in this modern sense emerged alongside Galileos new physics, and his conceptual division between the primary and secondary qualities of objects the primary being figure (or shape), size, position, motion, and quantity, while the secondary included color, taste, aroma, and sound. The secondary attributes were said to inhere in the subject, creating a division that was foundational to the emerging scientific worldview.
This division created the framework for the modern, mechanistic view of the world, which Descartes further entrenched with his separation of mind (res cogitans) and body (res extensa). This was, in turn, set against the backdrop of a universe devoid of teleology (action for a purpose). Given these background assumptions, the foundational worldview of early modern science begins to emerge: the individual ego contemplating exact ideas, in a clockwork universe driven by mechanical forces, amenable to precise description in the language of mathematics. (Notice, however, that while the individual ego may be ostensibly bracketed out in this worldview, it remains implicit as the locus of observation and measurement.)
As philosopher Thomas Nagel described it:
Galileo and Descartes made the crucial conceptual division by proposing that physical science should provide a mathematically precise, quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatiotemporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them. Subjective appearances, on the other hand how this physical world appears to human perception were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers. It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind as well as human intentions and purposes from the physical world in order to permit this powerful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality to develop?.
This is where the primacy of the objective stance begins to appear. It aims for the elimination or at least suspension of all traces of subjectivity, so as to arrive at an understanding built solely on the basis of these spatiotemporal primary qualities, those things that are objectively measurable, and believed, furthermore, to be objectively real, above and beyond any opinion or conjecture. They are what is truly there which helps us to understand why physics became paradigmatic for the scientific outlook, generally, at the outset of modernity.?
The difficulty with the strictly objectivist approach is that it leaves no room at all for the subject for us, in fact, as human beings. Viewed objectively, instead, h.sapiens is a fortuitous byproduct of the same essentially mindless process that causes the movements of the planets; were one species amongst many others. As Friedrich Nietszche foresaw, this portends nihilism, the sense that the Universe is meaningless, devoid of any purpose or value save what the individual ego is able to conjure or project. It was an intuition that the great Erwin Schrödinger was well aware of:
I am very astonished that the scientific picture of the real world around me is deficient. It gives a lot of factual information, puts all our experience in a magnificently consistent order, but it is ghastly silent about all and sundry that is really near to our heart, that really matters to us. It cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight; it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity. Science sometimes pretends to answer questions in these domains, but the answers are very often so silly that we are not inclined to take them seriously.?
Of course, none of this is exactly news, there has been massive commentary over centuries of how the objective sciences rob the world of meaning. The point is, for all of its objective power, science also contains a fundamental lacuna, a gap or an absence, at its center. How, then, can we expect it reveal what is truly so? What kind of truth are we left with, if we ourselves are not part of it?
This tension between the objective stance and the role of the knowing subject raises profound questions about the real nature of existence questions that go beyond the purview of science and into the domain of philosophy. ...
---
1. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, University of Chicago Press; Fourth edition, 30 April 2012
2. Modern philosophy is characterised by a concerted rejection of tradition. In its stead rose the view Polanyi calls objectivism, a view embracing a completely detached ideal of knowledge. The Cartesian ideal of achieving a Gods eye view (what Descartes calls The Archimedean Point), from which to survey all objects of knowledge independently of prior assumptions, is an impossible (and ultimately harmful) dream. (Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, cited in Mark T. Mitchell, Michael Polanyi: The Art of Knowing.)
3. https://www.etymonline.com/word/objective
4. Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False, Oxford University Press, 2012, Pp35-36
5. Subject of another of Thomas Nagels books, The View from Nowhere, OUP, 1986
6. Erwin Schrodinger, Nature and the Greeks, Cambridge University Press, 1996
Extracted from Scientific Objectivity and Philosophical Detachment (Medium)
...to be continued
Comments (230)
Quoting Wayfarer
I have no significant commitments to any particular perspective except that my intuition and observations suggest (to me) that life is intrinsically meaningless. But we do generate contingent value and meaning collectively and individually through experience.
But it seems to me the role of emotion is the missing piece in many discussions. We are emotional creatures. It seems to me that our reasoning and preferences are shaped by our affective relationships with the world, and we then construct post hoc rationalizations.
The things science struggles with - delight, love, joy, purpose - are, needless to say, emotions and these are in the end what "cause" us to act and hold beliefs.
It also seems to me that philosophy and other intellectual endeavours are attempts by us to reconcile our emotional lives with the way things seem to be.
Do you think we all do that, or do you think rather that we all have a natural tendency to do that; a tendency which can be overcome by critical reason? I see broadly two types on these forums and in my experience of philosophical discussions with my university friends: there are those who want things to be a certain way and spend time and effort marshalling evidence to support their biases, and there are those of a more scientific spirit, who are open to changing their minds if they find reasons or evidence more compelling than what they have been aware of.
Well, we are creatures of our times. I am trying to show that this is a natural implication of the 'cartesian division'. Which reminds me of the phrase I often quote, that of the 'Cartesian Anxiety':
[quote=Richard J Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis]Cartesian anxiety refers to the notion that, since René Descartes posited his influential form of body-mind dualism, Western civilization has suffered from a longing for ontological certainty, or feeling that scientific methods, and especially the study of the world as a thing separate from ourselves, should be able to lead us to a firm and unchanging knowledge of ourselves and the world around us. The term is named after Descartes because of his well-known emphasis on "mind" as different from "body", "self" as different from "other".[/quote]
Vervaeke says that this division is a fundamental aspect of our 'cultural grammar'.
But you do think that some worldviews are more plausible than others, no? For example, why should we think that life is inherently meaningful in some overarching way, when there is no evidence whatsoever that this is the case, and no logical reason why it should be the case?
Of course, life is not meaningless to individual humans or other animalswe all have things that matter to us.
I think this is a helpful and concise outline of your project, Wayfarer. :up:
In general, though, I am always left with the question of what exactly your thesis is. I would like something clear, like, "Scientism says X, but I say ~X," or, "I say X and Scientism would altogether disagree with me."
Because very often it seems that we are left with a wide-ranging modus tollens. For example:
1. If X is true, then "we ourselves are not part of [the truth we know]."
2. But that can't be right.
3. Therefore, X must be false.
X could be Scientism, or Realism, or some variety of Objectivism; but whatever it is, this overarching argument rebukes it. Now this isn't actually such a bad argument, but most all of your opponents are going to reject (1). I think the key is therefore to find an X such that a proponent of X would not reject (1). On my view this would be a thinker who says that humans are capable of objective knowledge despite the fact that humans possess no special capacity to know truth (e.g. some varieties of eliminative materialism). More simply: that humans are capable of objective knowledge and are no qualitatively different than the lower animals. More generally: that humans are capable of objective knowledge and yet are themselves opaque to investigation. This niche is where I agree with your project, but I disagree when you go farther and make X = Realism.
Let me add that the reason it is not a bad argument is because (2) is persuasive, namely because self-knowledge should be epistemically accessible. But it is worth adding at the same time that self-knowledge is also difficult and elusive, and therefore the fact that X abandons the difficult task is in some ways understandable.
(ever-so-slight nod, from the back of the room)
Quoting Wayfarer
In fact, this might be two distinct difficulties. First, as you say, subjectivity appears to be left out of scientism. But we could still view homo sapiens as merely one (mindless) species among many. The additional difficulty is that, without an account of subjectivity, nothing homo sapiens may allegedly learn about the world and themselves can have any claim to justification -- there can be no reasons, since reasons are not part of the objective world. This seems to rule out any view of h. sapiens that purports to be true. At best, we could point to the physical factors that cause us to have the opinions we have. But that circles us back to the first difficulty: What does it mean to "have an opinion" if there is no subject to judge?
I don't know. Sure, some people change views, but then people also fall in and out of love. I'm not confident that it is reasoning that crystallises choices and values. And some people are just more obvious about their process.
Quoting Wayfarer
I am happy to be a creature of my times, if that's what it amounts to - I quite like the times we are in. And I don't have a preferred nostalgia project myself - "things were better before we lost..." etc. This is what MAGA probably has in common with Vervaeke. We took a wrong turn at Albuquerque and need to go back. Obviously there are sophisticated and rudimentary versions of this trope.
Quoting Janus
It certainly is experienced that way by me. But critics will simply say we've inherited the godless secularism of our age. We're in that fuckin' cave, Cobber.
That said, I think there are better and worse ways to live, subject to contingent factors. If you value honesty, you probably wouldn't work in advertising, say. But such values are context dependent.
I personally don't long for certainty or truth, which to me seem to be the secular version of god. I have never taken a big interest in science, but I do believe its application has achieved more than prayer or crystal channeling.
My interest in philosophy is modest, not global. I am not particularly interested in some big picture of how the human race ought to proceed. My intuitions and experience suggest that this is answerable. For me it comes down to personal relationships and experiences and what one does about them. You seem to be more interested in trying to solve a global problem via a countercultural view that the mainstream is lost in some way. I don't have that ambition. But I remain very interested in your posts here.
Quoting J
Good question.
Thank you!
Quoting Leontiskos
Well, it's only part 1!
I would hope that the reach of the argument is more than simply 'scientism', although that is certainly as aspect of it. I question the way you're interpreting it. The point about objectivity first appearing in the early 1600's is significant. It is the beginning of a different kind of awareness or consciousness with the beginning of the modern period. It's by no means a bad thing, but it has a shadow side, which is precisely that sense of outside-ness, otherness, alienation or disconnection. Max Weber wrote of the 'great disenchantment', to describe the character of a modernized, bureaucratic, secularized Western society. In Western society, according to Weber, scientific understanding is more highly valued than belief, and processes are oriented toward rational goals.' (Wikipedia) That is also the subject of the New Left's criticism of the 'instrumentalisation of reason'.
Quoting Leontiskos
We'll get to that.
Quoting J
Hence - nihilism. Nothing is true, nothing really matters, and so on. I don't think nihilism always manifests as something dramatic or obviously awful. It can be a shrug, a 'so what?' Also very big part of the shadow of modernity.
I guess that gets us into philosophical anthropology - what is man (sorry for the gender specificity) in the greater scheme? We'll get to that, too.
I'm not sure what you mean by "scientism" here. Do you just mean science or the obviously incorrect idea that everything about humans and other living beings can be explained by physics?
I think that subjectivity is rightly left out of science (unless you count sociology, psychology and phenomenology as sciences (and even there it would depend on what you mean by 'leaving out subjectivity'). Also 'objectivity' in my view should be taken to mean nothing more than 'lack of bias'.
Quoting J
There obviously are subjects (individuals) who make judgements, so what's the problem? Are you worried about the human lack of absolute certainty? Why does the reality that our ideas and beliefs are neural processes rule out the validity of giving and asking for reasons? I've never understood that view, and I've never heard a reasoned argument to support it. It seems perfectly obvious that our ideas and beliefs are both neural processes, and that they are held for reasons both valid and invalid, sound and unsound, and that they are all defeasible.
Quoting Tom Storm
Yes, but is there any reason to think such a criticism is not tendentiously self-serving? Why should we give credence to arguments that lack evidence or logic to support them; arguments that are not really arguments at all, but mere polemical cultural tropes that are often in the service of misplaced moral crusades.
The modern critical mind has dispensed with God because there is no need for it other than for those who, on account of childhood conditioning or insecurity in the face of the knowledge of suffering and death, cannot rid themselves of the comforting fantasy. Why should we wish to live in thrall to tradition, as Hegel said, "Under the aegis of tutelage"?
As you no doubt know I have no problem with people's personal faiths, but they have no place in philosophical discussion just because there is no critical, evidential or logical support for them. When people delude themselves that their personal faiths must be objectively true, then the door to fundamentalism has swung open. Ideology is the greatest scourge of humankind in my view. In extremis, people will kill and die for ideologies, and that really is absurd.
This is addressed in the subsequent sections.
So what is your solution in all this!!??
Subjectivity is never outside science. It is always in its genesis. What happens is that subjectivity is neutralized by phenomena such as repetition. That is, someone once invented the Pythagorean theorem, but through different mechanisms: language, writing, and repetitive processes that lead to its fulfillment, the theorem went from being the subjective invention of a person to a broader field of existence. It is a process of objectification. The same happens with sciences such as physics where experimentation becomes repetitive and theories are confirmed over and over again transcending the subjectivities always necessary to make the experiments.
In this sense objectivity is not simply the theory that corresponds to reality, but the theory that reaches an ontological degree in which reality and subjectivity are immersed. So we must even say that the theory of relativity transcends laboratories and experiments and reaches an ontological degree of its own. But of course nothing without these moments of neutrality of the particularities and thus to transit on the way of infinite universality and objectification.
The way that the modern period in its progression has encountered the perennial problem of universals seems to be as follows:
1. If knowledge is objective, then it isn't subjective.
2. If knowledge is subjective, then it isn't objective.
(KO ? ~KS)
(And the bijection also tends to hold)
What happens is that on this view in order to secure the objectivity of knowledge one must never talk about the subjectivity of the knower, and the subjectivity of the knower thus becomes a black hole. This neglect of subjective realities such as belief, intention, and conscience leads to the erosion and opacity of those realities in these philosophical paradigms. For example, Klima's paper on Anselm is more about this than what was actually discussed in the thread, for the inability of modern logic to conceptualize parasitic reference is a direct consequence of its abandoning subjectivity and intention. See also Simpson's critique of Wittgenstein.
Note too via Klima's paper how parasitic reference (and an explicit recognition of subjective intentionality via ampliation) secures rational commensurability between interlocutors, whereas the opacity of subjective intentionality and theories of reference that can't account for it lead very quickly to incommensurable gulfs between interlocutors. That is but one of the problems with the lack of subjectivity in the modern period: an inability to reckon with disagreements between subjects; for disagreement brings out the crucial fact that subjects are involved, and it does this in an especially quick and potent way.
I don't get this. It's like the 'blind spot of science' argument. I just don't think anyone who has really thought about the question denies that science deals with the world as it is perceived by us. I've asked the question many times as to what 'including the subject' could look like in the sciences that investigate the non-human. The subject is simply not the subject of inquiry in those sciences, but of course the inquiry itself is carried out by humans (subjects).
That's an interesting analysis, although I don't think that 'subjectivity is neutralised by repetition' really holds water. As for the Pythagorean theorem, the age-old question is, invented or discovered? I believe it is the latter. The theorem concerns something that would be true, even it were never discovered.
So I suppose what you're saying is that when only a single subject has such an insight, then it's subjective, but that as it becomes more and more widely known and accepted, then it is seen as objective. That is an interesting way to consider it. I'll think that over.
I did say "can be overcome by critical reason". I didn't say that biases commonly are overcome by critical reason. I think a clear and general view of human life would quickly disabuse anyone of the latter idea.
And I gave you two examples: the novelty of parasitic reference in modern logic and the yielding of Schopenhauer's dynamism to Wittgenstein's mirror. Russell, Quine, and (early) Wittgenstein are examples of the neglect of subjectivity, and the two papers in question underline that point.
Even science can only be objective in regard to what is actually observed. Theoretical explanation of what is observed are another matter.
How does it not? When two persons perform the same proof of the theorem both are neutralized and it can no longer be said that they are the raison d'être of the theorem. Subjectivity no longer justifies the nature of what has been proved although it has participated in its genesis. In this sense the theorem has been invented but has reached a degree of objectivity. In general we consider that something invented is not objective; my point is to show that something can be objective even if it is invented.
Quoting Wayfarer
Kinda. But not only because it is known but because in the construction of the theorem there are different realities involved in the matter. But what is important is repetition as a means of a virtually infinite induction that transcends, transcends subjectivity, transcends cultures, transcends subject, trasciende experiments and so on ad infinitum.
The theorem transcends and become "objective" by repetition and neutralization of particular genesis.
I think it's a mistaken notion of 'subjectivity'. Subjectivity doesn't only pertain to what is specific to a single individual. Later in the essay I distinguish the subjective from the personal:
So are you claiming that theoretical explanation is not within the purview of science?
Quoting Janus
I think there is all manner of bleed between the two spheres.
So if I understand you correctly, you're saying that objectivity isnt just about consensus, but about how an insight is tested, repeated, and confirmed across different contexts until its original, subjective or cultural genesis is no longer relevant. In that sense, objectivity emerges when a claim is validated to the point that it 'transcends' individual perspectives and particular origins. Would you say this is close to what you mean?
Quoting Wayfarer
Certainly we are able to see things as they truly are. There is no way the world is in itself The world shows itself to us in our practical engagements with it. This world that we are already deeply and directly in touch with is the only world that will ever matter to us.
Quoting Wayfarer
Kuhns paradigmatic model does not rely on personal perspective in the sense of a subjective representation of reality. Rather. it is based on practices of DOING THINGS with the world.
It is difficult for me to understand this. Isn't it some kind of a big mind or trascendental ego? By the way, The essential structures of a transcendental ego are essential because they are discovered in an eidetic reduction of psychology. In such a case we are talking about an essence that belongs to every human being. But there is a continuity with what I am saying: the reduction is the product of an imaginary variation (method of phenomenology). It is a process that leads us to a repetition, finding this structure in all people, don't you think? It is something that we discover as repetition through a neutralization (imaginary variation).
This is too deep in fenomenology, you can ignore me.
Yes.
So when is part 2?
Objectivity only exists if a subject exists to promulgate it. But that which is being objectivized may exist (have independent reality) without subjective explanation/inquiry and hence without objective explanation.
Maybe too simplified?
trying to keep up smile
Its certainly one aspect of it.
Very good. And a real problem for the question per se, I think. Maybe they simply cannot come apart and our world still be seen to cohere.
For me, there's also a question of 'truth' here. We're talking justification and related concepts - but truth only applies to beliefs and thoughts about things that (theoretically) already are. So, in line with another recent thread I think 'nature' is taken to be true to avoid this issue. If there is, in fact, a state of affairs prior to any mind apprehending it, then that would be 'natural'. For that reason 'objectivity' seems to be a concept which could only apply to consensus.
Not at all. I'm claiming that theories cannot be demonstrated to be true, they can only be provisionally accepted on the basis that what they predict is always reliably observed.
Quoting Leontiskos
I agree, of course. I think philosophy, at least epistemology and ontology/ metaphysics if not ethics and aesthetics should be informed by science.
Quoting AmadeusD
I'd change that to "unbiased consensus".
Understood!
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, and I didn't mean to imply that nothing more than Scientism is at stake. Hopefully the remainder of my post corrected that possible reading. My point about, "Scientism says X," is that I think your project needs more concreteness. Often enough you give your genealogical speech beginning with Descartes, but it feels as if there is no punch line or climactic turn. There needs to be a concrete conclusion, even if it is provisional, e.g., "It all began with Descartes... ...And that is why apple pie is now at risk of going extinct." Apple pie is a big deal, and anyone who slept through the first part will sit up straight and pay close attention once they realize what is at stake. :smile:
My time on TPF is making me wary of "Pontifications from 30,000 feet":
Quoting Leontiskos
The trick is to say something on the ground level, where people can engage and argue with it. It should be something that moves the needle but does not win the day. Small steps and concrete arguments that are able to carry others along or at least generate meaningful disagreements.
The danger is to simply reiterate over and over a 30,000 foot claim about 400 years of history, instead of breaking it down and moving step by step in a rigorous and transparent way.
And although I probably shouldn't be so frank after our recent political standoff, the reason everyone is wondering about part 2 is because we have all heard part 1 many times, albeit not marshalled so eloquently. In fact it is fairly common to rehearse one's starting point when one has not quite worked out where their ending point is. But I will await the continuation with everyone else (which I am assuming will occur within this thread).
Good post Amadeus. I hope I don't derail the thread, but I don't follow the reasoning of your last sentence. Cannot one have objective knowledge apart from a consensus? That even if only one person existed they could still know things objectively? It seems to me that placing objectivity in consensus puts the cart before the horse, and that the most important advances in knowledge tend to ignore the prevailing consensus.
So I would want to say that objectivity implies confirmability, and confirmability implies the plausibility of a consensus; but that to know objectively is something that we are capable of irrespective of any given consensus.
Consider an allegory. Three men are viewing a parcel of land. One is a real-estate developer, one an agriculturalist, and one a geological surveyor. They all have different uses for that land, and would all develop it in different ways, with very different consequences. If what that land is, is entirely determined by the use it is eventually put to, does that mean the land itself has no reality independently of those uses?
Of course, this is only an allegory, but it raises the question: do these different perspectives fully exhaust the nature of what the land is? Or is there something more to it?
Quoting Leontiskos
Think of this part as the introduction. It is the statement of the issue. The ensuing sections will look at various ways to address it.
Quoting AmadeusD
This was discussed in another thread, Why is Nature True? What is 'natural' turns out to be quite a difficult thing to nail down
Sounds good. :up:
I think you're on the right track in one way. The reason I introduced the distinction between the 'merely personal' and the 'subjective', is because of the way that the latter gets dismissed as being the former. What I meant was, Western culture has principled respect for the individual as 'freedom of conscience' - but at the same time, principles which are not objectively verifiable are treated as being subjective or personal, which kind of trivialises them. So yes, I'm pointing to something like the transcendental ego of Kant and Husserl. You get that right.
But I don't know if you're on the right track with the phenomenological reduction. I'm not expert at that subject, but it is not at all to do with repetition or the socialisation of belief. However, I will postpone responding to that, because Part 2, which I might as well go ahead and post soon, because it is already being anticipated in the commentary, will explicitly bring in phenomenology.
Also wanted to add - yes, of course you're right about that. It was carelessly expressed on my part. But he does insist on the primacy of scientific paradigms, which are in some important sense, conceptual constructions.
Phenomenology, a transformative philosophical movement that emerged in the early 20th century, seeks disciplined insight into the nature of lived experience by returning to the things themselves referring to the direct experience of phenomena as they appear to the subject, rather than through their abstract, symbolic representation in thought. Founder Edmund Husserl (18591938) realised that the starting point for philosophy is not analysis of the objective world out there, which is properly the role of natural science, but insight into the ways in which this world is disclosed to consciousness through paying close attention to the nature of experience, moment by moment. Husserl saw that rather than being a passive recipient of external data, the mind actively participates in the process of knowing shaped by underlying structures of consciousness. Through the method of the epoch?, or phenomenological reduction, Husserl reveals how these structures shape not only experience but the very foundation of our understanding of the nature of existence.
Husserl showed that every judgment about the world, even those based on scientific observation, depends on interpretive acts, must be understood as constituents of the lifeworld (Lebenswelt)?, the domain of immediate experience that underlies theoretical abstractions, which had been previously ignored by an over-emphasis on the objective. The Lebenswelt is where objectivity and subjectivity interact it is the shared foundation that makes objective inquiry possible. Husserl, in effect, had realised anew the role of the scientist in the pursuit of scientific knowledge.
This insight reframes the question of things as they truly are. If all experience is mediated by consciousness, then objectivity itself is always bound to the structures of subjectivity. Far from being an impediment, the subject is implicit in any coherent philosophy?.
To clarify this distinction, consider the act of looking out a window. Naturalism concerns itself with what you can see outside: the objects, events, and phenomena unfolding in the world. It aims to describe these with precision and detachment, focusing solely on their objective characteristics. Phenomenology, by contrast, is like studying the act of looking itself: the awareness of the scene, the structures of perception, and the way the world is disclosed to you as a subject. While naturalism investigates the external landscape, phenomenology turns the lens inward, asking how that landscape appears to and is interpreted by the observer. So it is characterised by a certain kind of detached self-awareness. This shift in focus introduces a self-awareness that naturalism, in its strict adherence to objective fact, often neglects.
Husserls phenomenology was to become the wellspring for many later developments in European philosophy, in particular that of Martin Heidegger and other existentialists. But it hardly need be said that Husserl was not the first or only philosopher of the firstperson experience. For that, we can look back into the annals of philosophical spirituality. (That will be the subject of Part 3.)
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7. Routledge, Introduction to Phenomenology, p139
8. The term Lebenswelt, translated as lifeworld, refers to the pre-theoretical, lived world of everyday experience. For Husserl, this is the foundation upon which all scientific and objective knowledge is built. The Lebenswelt encompasses the cultural, historical, and experiential context in which phenomena appear to us and is often taken for granted or overlooked in the pursuit of abstract objectivity. A related concept is the Umwelt, introduced by biologist Jakob von Uexküll, which describes the subjective world as experienced by an organism, shaped by its unique sensory and perceptual capacities. Both terms emphasize that our experience of reality is always mediated by our cognitive and sensory structures, situating objective knowledge within a broader subjective context.
9. This was made abundantly clear by the observer problem of quantum physics.
Additional references:
The Phenomenological Reduction IEP
Key Ideas in Phenomenology: The Natural Attitude
Not much rescuing of the subject there, insofar as the subject still has the functional necessity for understanding the content the study of looking implicates.
I know you knew, and thereby expected, such objection would arise; far be it from me to disappoint, donchaknow. (Grin)
Closer to the latter. Good science should say, re consciousness and subjectivity, "We just don't know. Stay tuned." Scientism, in contrast, rules out the non-physical, and favors mechanistic bottom-up explanation.
Quoting Janus
Well, it seems obvious to you and me, but it's very difficult for a physicalist to explain how or why this can be. What sort of thing is a "judgment"? Does it have propositional content? Truth-value? But what could such things amount to, if everything is physical? BTW, it's still a problem even if we agree that subjects are real -- the Hard Problem, in fact.
Compare the difference between psyche and pneuma in Classical Greek, or "soul" and "spirit" in Christian theology.
Here's a good description of what Husserl opposed, from The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (also quoted by Bernstein in the book you cited):
Bernstein goes on to make an interesting point. He says that Husserl "fails to stress the dialectical similarity" between objectivism and transcendentalism:
What Bernstein makes of this would throw us off course, so I'll stop here, as the discussion has been nicely focused thus far.
Quoting Wayfarer
Its not just that the different uses of the land bring with them their own real dimensions of meaning. The concept of parcel of land is itself already a discursively produced normative meaning. But just because our materially real meanings already move within some set of discursive practices or other doesnt mean that the practices themselves are static. They are, in Joseph Rouses words, temporally extended. This means that practices only exist by being repeated, and the repetition itself, in partially shared circumstances, is always anticipatory, oriented toward new directions of understanding. As Rouse explains:
Is there more to the nature of things than this? Let me put it this way, if there is, it can never be anything that we articulate, since any way we formulate this idea already presupposes some prior practical stance toward and engagement with what is claimed to be independent of us.
Quoting Wayfarer
Something seems to be missing here. This description focuses solely on an inner mental aspect of perception, as though there were the objects out there and the representing of them in here. This reminds me of Dreyfuss cognitive science misreading of Husserl. The subjective pole of consciousness does not just process and interpret. Through intentional acts , it constitutes the objects as what they are and how they are. This does not mean that it invents them out of whole cloth, but neither does it mean that there is any aspect of the object that simply independent of the subject. The object gets itself sense from an inseparable synthetic co-construction effected between the noetic-egoic and the noematic-objective sides of an intentional act.
The ego pole projects an anticipatory sense forward , a form of belief, and the object assimilates itself into this anticipated meaning while simultaneously completing the intentional act by obliging the ego to accommodate its anticipated sense to what is novel in the object. Thus, spatial objects are real for Husserl as idealizations constituted via synthetic acts of consciousness on the basis of the adumbration of similarities of sense. We dont ever actually see spatial objects as persisting identities, and have no basis for assuming the reality of such unities besides our sciences, whose notions of objects as self-identities in externally causal interaction are themselves abstractions and idealizations derived from phenomenological acts.
Thus, scientific naturalism, what Husserl calls the natural attitude, doesnt differ from a phenomenological analysis by being oriented toward the outside world while phenomenology is interested in inner experience, as though the external landscape would still be what it is without the participation of intentional acts. Phenomenology shows us that the outside is already an idealization constituted within transcendental consciousness. In other words, the very distinction between outside and inside is an artifact of the naive thinking of the natural attitude.
Quoting Wayfarer
If I understand the aim of your OP correctly, youre trying to get to the bottom of the relation between subject and world. Inn order to do so, we must grapple with the nature of subjectivity, and thisn requires an understanding of notions like conceptual construction and consciousness. I follow Thompson in tracing the origins of consciousness and cognition to the goal-directed normativity of the simplest living systems. Put simply, we dont have to remain at the level of human conceptuality. By understanding what an object is for a bacterium, how their active interactions with their world constitutes what its reality is by reference to how it matters to them, we have already come a long way toward solving the mystery of what is real and how we come to know it.
There is a classic mistake that is often made in using the term objectivity. Objectivity and subjectivity refer to knowledge, but sometimes they are confused with references to truth. Knowledge is not truth. Knowledge is a system of logic applied to a circumstance that produces the most reasonable outcome that is not contradicted by reality.
The easiest is subjective knowledge. Your experience is something you know. Currently there is no way for another person to know your subjective viewpoint of the world as it is limited to only the being that is having the subjective experience.
Objective knowledge is a logical claim about the world that can be understood and known apart from subjective experience. For example, I can introduce the concept of math and teach it to someone else. I can demonstrate and prove scientific concepts like gravity. Whether I exist to subjectively experience it is irrelevant to the fact that the objective notions and proofs can be taken, learned, and concluded in the same way by any being with the necessary minimal intelligence.
Truth is simply 'what is'. There really is no objective or subjective truth, and its a misapplication of the terms. There is objective and subjective knowledge. Its true that a person can have objective and subjective knowledge. And it may be true that one's subjective knowledge actually does not capture truth, while one's subjective knowledge may capture what is true. There is no objective or subjective truth. Just knowledge.
Further confusion sometimes results in people thinking that 'objectivity' is some thing out there independent of a subject. Objectivity is an approach to knowledge, and knowledge can only be held and understood by something that can realize what it has, or a subject itself. The difference in subjectivity and objectivity are again the limits of human logic and provability. I cannot logically prove to someone else what it is for me personally to experience 'redness'. But we can objectively note that a wavelength of X frequency is red. It is about whether the knowledge we have can be packaged to others provably, or remains a private outlook.
Quoting Wayfarer
We do not have truth, we have knowledge. No science or valid methodology of knowledge asserts that it has the truth. It contains what is most reasonable to conclude within the logical and applicable limits we have. Science has little to say about your subjective experience as it is impossible to capture. Its not just science, but anyone. Even the closest person in your life doesn't know what your actual subjective experience is.
As such, we can't truly communicate the subjective. We can attempt to. I can talk about red and how I like it, and you can only take your subjective experience about red and believe that in some way its similar to another. But communication of a subjective experience is a nebulous endeavor sustained on faith and shaped by the subjective world lens of every individual. The only way out of it is to find some common outside variables that we can all logically agree are most reasonable, which is of course objectivity.
So we do include experiences where we can like, "Happiness, sadness, etc." We see there is enough commonality in behavior and expression and biological reactions that we can create a broad approximation that allows the variety of subjective human experience to relate to it. But that's currently the best we can do.
Completely agree, and partly why I have never really understood what Wayferer is trying to push with his perspective and what precisely he is saying is lacking or what that has to do with science.
Id agree with that. The example of looking out the window was simply to make a distinction between naturalism, which only considers what is seen, and phenomenology, which also takes into account the act of looking.
Quoting Joshs
I very much appreciate your remarks. But what motivated the essay is the sense that objectivity, what is objectively the case, is the sole criterion of truth. That whatever really exists is out there somewhere as the saying goes. I think that will become clearer in the following sections.
Quoting Joshs
We will have a much better grasp of the nature of cognition generally, agree. But to me the principle subject matter of philosophy is the human condition.
Quoting Joshs
Whatever that might be may not be made subject to propositional knowledge, which already is a matter of implicit consensus, but it may be a subject of insight which is conveyed symbolically or by gesture or in art. Besides, this is where I feel that Husserls wesen (essence) is significant. Granted theyre not self-existent platonic forms, but theyre still an underlying reality in some important sense, that are not grasped by objectivism. (I will come back to that.)
Quoting Philosophim
Any being presumably meaning a human being, in that so far as we know, we are the only beings with such capabilities.
Quoting Philosophim
Quoting Philosophim
Those are rather sweeping statements. As it happens, I do believe that the grasp of, insight into, what is truly so is attainable and is the proper subject for philosophical contemplation.
Further to the distinction between the structures of subjectivity and the merely personal, a snippet from the IEP article on Phenomenological Reduction (a very detailed and deep article, I will add, and one Im still absorbing)
[quote=IEP]Thus, it is by means of the epoch? and reduction proper that the human I becomes distinguished from the constituting I; it is by abandoning our acceptance of the world that we are enabled to see it as captivating and hold it as a theme. It is from this perspective that the phenomenologist is able to see the world without the framework of science or the psychological assumptions of the individual.[/quote]
The same distinction I made between the subjective and the merely personal.
Thanks all for the very constructive feedback, Im away from desk for today look forward to further remarks and criticisms.
You want to know what is out there as the underlying reality for Husserl, apart from iintentionally constituted objects? An utterly formless, structureless flow of change. Husserl shows us the difference between how the world looks to us after we have constituted it through objectivizing intentional syntheses (what he calls constitutive time) and how the world is in itself prior to such constituting acts (what he calls constituting time).
I think this is largely correct. And it foregrounds the conceptual challenge: If we do not invent objects out of whole cloth, what are the constraints put upon the way we constitute them? Will the lifeworld allow anything? Or, said another way: If we did invent objects out of whole cloth, how would we be able to tell the difference between doing that and merely constituting them through intentional acts? What would mark one or the other description of what we do as being the correct one?
This was posted seconds before my post above, responding to a similar concern. So now I can ask: Is the utterly formless, structureless flow nevertheless constraining, in some degree, of what we can constitute as an object or event? How is this flow not "whole cloth," as it were?
Everything science says is a statement of subjective experience. Your subjective experience sits smack dab in the very heart of scientific concepts, by way of the intersubjective interaction which transforms subjective experience into the flattened , mathematicized abstractions that pretend to supersede it, while in fact only concealing its richness within its generic vocabulary.
I do as well, but the best we can do in that is use knowledge. You might want to check out my post here https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/14044/knowledge-and-induction-within-your-self-context/p1
Sure, but there is no way to communicate about qualitative experiences in a way that is any different to what science, or any other intellectual field, does when it constructs knowledge and talks about things. You can't really go any deeper.
Quoting Wayfarer
I have a tiny idea you might find useful. You look out the window and Naturalism focuses on the out there. Phenomenology can focus on the glass itself, which represents the subject, and is simultaneously colored by the out there as it vaguely reflects your own face on the inside of the window pane - the subjective imposed on the objective, in one simultaneous view.
I dont know. Its where I thought you were going when you said consider the act of looking out a window. Tiny idea thought you might make use of.
I can't see how science can deal with the non-physical. And I also can't see how it can factor into any of our thinking, although I suppose it depends on what you mean by "non-physical".
I don't understand top-down explanations, explanations in terms of global laws and constraints as being non-physical.
Quoting J
I think the so-called Hard Problem is overrated, overplayed. It is a prejudice of mechanistic thinking that matter could not possibly perceive, experience, think and judge. Granted we don't understand how it happens, but the question being asked is perhaps an impossible one. If it is to be answered, I can't see how it could be anything but science that answers it. If it is unanswerable, then what conclusions could we draw from that?
Agreed. Or as I said in the "Mind as Uncaused Cause" thread:
"[We need] a completely different understanding of what terms like "physical," "mental," "subjective" et al. mean. The "hard problem," I think, has all the hallmarks of a question that has to have been stated incorrectly, though it's the best we can do at the moment . . . we shall see."
I would be astonished if consciousness as a phenomenon didn't turn out to be biological, and capable of scientific explanation. Subjectivity -- what it's like to be conscious -- may be a different matter.
I have always wondered why Husserl still maintains the idea of a self, ego, (in your case subjectivity) in this domain of the transcendental. Especially when he relates it to intersubjectivity. Husserl would say that every man can have access to this domain of the transcendental, so what is true for one is true for the rest. Is there, again, the hope in a repetition? Something that repeats itself from man to man in which a particularity is neutralized, in this case the monadic ego. Just wonder...
It may be a different matter, or perhaps not. "What it's like to be conscious'is that not a manifold of perceptions and bodily feelings? Surely animals have such manifolds, different to ours of course, and neither we nor they are conscious of all the different aspects that go to making up what might be described as simply a sense of being there that we and they may be more or less aware of.
Great!
Quoting Apustimelogist
Different sciences talk about things in different ways. Some rely on reductive causal abstractions, some begin from the contextually particular circumstances of persons in interaction. Its not a question going into the depths of an inner subjectivity but of staying close to the interactive surface of intersubjective practice and. it abstracting away from it with with claims to pure objective description.
Science attempts to explain how and why what we all observe is the way it is. It is unquestionable that we, and the other animals live in and experience the same world. Nonetheless how we experience the same things differs from individual to individual.
Science records individual observations of phenomena and attempts to understand them in ways which are consistent with the vast and coherent body of scientific knowledge and understanding which has evolved over at least hundreds of years,
I agree with you that science deals in generalitiespretty much everything we talk about does. Symbolic language is all generalizing, and individual experience is very particular. Symbolic language cannot discursively present the living particularity and dynamism of experienceit can only do that allusively via poetry and literature.
Quoting J
We cant invent out of whole cloth.Wr invent what we want to invent, but what we want is already conditioned and informed by ways of understanding the world that we share with others. The fiction writer expresses aspects of the norms of their culture even when they think they are being utterly original. What is true and false, what ought to be and what ought not to be get their intelligibility from such larger partially shared patterns of meaningful practices. The world that we co-construct talks back to our inventions, offering constraints and affordances that are specifically responsive to those constructions.
Quoting Janus
The world is not a static frame with objects in it, it is a process of reflexive self-change , and our sciences, arts and other forms of creative niche construction particulate in this process. Since this world continues to be what it is by changing with respect to itself, there is no same world for any part of it to relate to. There are only partially shared patterns of action and interaction among its elements, including us humans. the aim of science is not to represent , but to change our interaction with it in ways that are intelligible and predicable.
Quoting J
It is not as though this flow were devoid of textures, of consonances and dissonances. When we slap abstractions like self-identical spatial object and effluent causation over the flow, we are not producing such distinctions out of thin air, but forming idealizations out of the constants and affordances which emerge from our own activities.
I presume you meant 'participate'...anyway I haven't anywhere said the world is a static frame with objects. It becomes that in the discursive telling, though.
That's true, as I see it.
Sure, but then I don't understand what the issue is. We have a whole range and breath of intellectual fields, sciences, arts, humanities that generate knowledge or culture in different ways. So I don't really understand what the central issue is here.
Wisdom begins with wonder comes to mind.
Quoting J
Yep.
But what does part 2 achieve in relation to part 1? It achieves a form of philosophy which more fully incorporates the subject. There are lots of targets involved in part 1, and phenomenology hits some and misses others. At the same time, I am not sure if Wayfarer targets certitude in the way that J does. That Husserl wants a foundation that will withstand historical vicissitudes may not be a problem at all, even for Wayfarer.
Well said, IEP!
Have to become a lover or a poet.
Wonder. And the suspected deficiency thereof.
Might that be your bridge to the phenomenological self-meditation, by which one .is able to liberate oneself from the captivation in which one is held by all that one accepts as being the case .?
Quoting Apustimelogist
The issue for me is that incorporation of the insights I mentioned can inform and transform the content of the hard sciences, just as it has already begun to have its effect on biology, neuroscience and cognitive psychology.
Thank you :pray:
Quoting Fire Ologist
Thats not quite it. The allegory of me looking out the window is the self-awareness of the act of looking. A reflection of oneself in a pane of glass is not itself first-person - it is not a subject. Thats the key point. Remember, what this is addressing is the omission or exclusion of the subject so as to derive a view which is hoped to be, if not completely objective, then as near to it as possible.
Quoting J
Suffice to say here that the reason I start with the Cartesian division is to highlight the way in which modern science and also culture simply assumes the self-other or self-world division. That in itself is a kind of implicit stance or way of being in the world, fundamental to the modern mindset. Modern thought has been completely world-changing in its sweep, but Chalmers is saying, ahem, pardon me, but what about 'consciousness'? (by which I think he actually means 'being'.) Hence my often-quoted reference to Bernstein's 'Cartesian Anxiety'. There's a section devoted to that in The Embodied Mind.
The authors see the 'Cartesian Anxiety' as a fundamental tension in modern thought that arises from the legacy of Descartes' dualism ('the Cartesian division). This anxiety stems from the fear that if knowledge cannot be grounded on an absolute, objective foundation, then we are left with relativism, where knowledge can never be secure. The authors argue that this dichotomybetween a fully objective reality independent of our perception and a world where everything is merely a projection of the mindis itself a false problem, one that has trapped Western epistemology in an unresolved crisis.
Their alternative is grounded in enactive cognition, which dissolves this anxiety by showing that knowledge is neither an objective grasp of an external reality nor a purely subjective construction. Instead it is an embodied process that arises through our interaction with the world. Cognition, in this framework, is not about representing a pre-given reality but about bringing forth a world through lived experience and structural coupling with the environment. This challenges the Cartesian assumption that knowledge must be either a mirror of reality or a complete fabrication of the mind.
The authors draw from Buddhist philosophy to support this perspective, particularly the idea of dependent origination, which suggests that there is no fixed, independent reality separate from our cognitive engagement ('everything arises due to causes and conditions'). The enactive, embodied approach to knowing moves beyond the paralysis of Cartesian Anxiety and recognizes that meaning emerges through our dynamic interactions rather than being imposed from an external or internal source.
However, in response to @Joshs remarks above, I'll note that the Buddhist principles in the book provide a normative dimension to the practice of enactivism which is often absent in contemporary approaches. Buddhism pursues a transformative insight, which has resonances with Husserl's epoch? (which is made especially clear in the IEP article on the Phenomenological Reduction). This transformative element provides a kind of 'pole star' that differentiates it from moral relativism but without falling into dogmatism.
I understand your perplexity. What drew me to philosophy was the quest for enlightenment. This is something that is often said to be 'spiritual' but that actually is a very over-used word and not especially helpful due to its rather Victorian connotations. Suffice to say that I've always had the intuition that there's something deeply the matter with the consensus understanding of the nature of existence. There is some vital insight that is missing or generally not appreciated or understood. For many, that need is addressed by religion, but I wasn't able to accept the answers provided by the religion I was brought up in (Anglican, although I retain elements of it.) I think philosophy proper, too, addresses this sense, albeit in a much more rigorous way. But if you go back to the figure of Socrates, he was, in his own way, a seeker of enlightenment, not that he would ever make direct pronouncements on where that lay. But I always felt that his emphasis on self-knowledge, and the characterisation of Socrates given as he faced his own death (in The Apology and also in The Phaedo) makes him a seminal figure in philosophical spirituality.
I think, overall, European philosophy and existentialism share more of that orientation than does English-speaking academic philosophy. Phenomenology was the wellspring of a great deal of that. I'll also acknowledge that this kind of philosophical spirituality is in the minority on the Forum.
A relevant essay might be Thomas Nagel's Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament. Nagel defines 'religion' as Nagel is a professed atheist, and an analytical philosopher, but he does at least grasp the sense of what those like myself feel is missing in secular philosophy.
All that said, you may well still not see what the issue is, but I hope that clarifies a little what I think it is.
For Husserl the objectivity of science is ensured by ideality as a repetition that transcends singular experience and can be repeated in different subjectivities (Ideas concerning a pure phenomenology and a phenomenological philosophy, Book I, § 18). The question is always how in an increasingly Cartesian enclosure there can be a communication and transmission for the ideality of meaning and truth to occur. According to this, the ideality of meaning must betray the principle of the principles of phenomenology, which is the pure evidence of meaning as something given as ideal once and for all immediately for consciousness.
No problema.
Hmm, I don't really recognize that at all, I don't think.
As seen above, a scientific orientation often leads us to assume that objectivity is the sole criterion for what is real. This approach seeks to arrive at a view from which the subject is bracketed out or excluded, focusing exclusively on the primary and measurable attributes of objects and forces. In this framework, the subjective is relegated to derivative status. However, in so doing, scientific objectivity also excludes the qualitative dimension of existence the reality of Being. This exclusion lies at the heart of the hard problem of consciousness, which is inextricably linked with the Cartesian divide. Scientific objectivity seeks to transcend the personal, but it does so at the cost of denying the reality of the subject¹?.
Since ancient times, both Eastern and Western philosophies have prized detachment as a virtue. It shares many characteristics with scientific objectivity but with a crucial difference. While both aim to transcend personal biases and arrive at an understanding of what is truly so, philosophical detachment seeks its goal through the transcendence of the ego, rather than by bracketing out the subjective altogether
To understand this distinction, we must first differentiate the subjective from the merely personal. The subjective refers to the structures of experience through which reality is disclosed to consciousness. In an important sense, all sentient beings are subjects of experience. Subjectivity or perhaps we could coin the term subject-hood encompasses the shared and foundational aspects of perception and understanding, as explored by phenomenology. The personal, by contrast, pertains to the idiosyncratic desires, biases, and attachments of a specific individual. Philosophical detachment requires rising above, or seeing through, these personal inclinations, but not through denying or suppressing the entire category of subjective understanding.
Skeptics and Stoics
Husserls epoch? has precursors in ancient philosophy. In ancient skepticism, particularly as practiced by Pyrrho of Elis, epoch? refers to the suspension of judgment. It is the act of withholding assent to any belief or claim due to the insufficiency of evidence to determine its truth or falsity. By suspending judgment, Pyrrho and his followers sought to achieve ataraxia (tranquility) and freedom from conflicting emotions by recognizing the limitations of human knowledge and the potential for conflict in clinging to opinions. This pursuit of ataraxia freedom from conflicting emotions and attachment to opinions echoes the Stoic ideal of apatheia, which we now turn to examine.
Stoic philosophy, which is enjoying a cultural resurgence, is built on the foundation of apatheia not mere indifference or callousness, but a state of calm equanimity that comes from freedom from irrational or extreme emotions (mood swings, in todays language). The Stoics believed that apatheia was the essential quality of the sage, unperturbed by events and indifferent to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Detachment, said one ancient worthy, is not that you should own nothing, but that nothing should own you.
The famous Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, a work that has been continuously in print since the advent of printing, exemplifies this philosophy. In it, Marcus Aurelius recommends avoiding indulgence in sensory pleasures, a form of skilled action that frees us from the pangs and pleasures of existence. He claims that the only way we can be harmed by others is to allow emotionality to hold sway over us. Like other Stoics, Marcus Aurelius believed that an orderly and rational nature, or logos, permeates and guides the universe. Living in harmony with this logos, through rationality and temperance, allows one to rise above the individual inclinations of what might be deemed good or bad, as well as external circumstances such as fame and wealth. In cultivating these qualities, the Stoic sage enjoys equanimity and imperturbability in the midst of lifes troubles.
As Marcus Aurelius succinctly puts it:
Through these shared themes of epoch? and ataraxia we can trace a lineage of detachment from the ancient skeptics, to the Stoics, to phenomenology each offering a path to seeing beyond the limitations of subjective opinion.
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10. Subject of David Chalmers famous 1996 essay, Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness.
Quoting Wayfarer
I would prefer to say that scientific concepts are
themselves qualitative ( mass, motion, energy,etc), and what characterizes them as leaving out what you call the subjective dimension is that these are peculiar kinds of qualities. They are flattened abstractions modeled as external to the subject. Bringing ourselves back into the picture returns scientific qualities back to the rich contexts of intersubjective relevance from which they were generated.
Quoting Wayfarer
A detached attitude is not the absence of affect; there is no such thing as affectless awareness. All forms of rationality get their sense and meaning from an underlying affective stance. By elevating detachment, one is simply substituting one mood for others and then proclaiming it the supreme rational value. Rather than aiming for detachment, one should do the opposite and immerse oneself as intricately as possible in the contextually shifting meanings that affective attunement to the world discloses. We need to get in touch with the bodily felt affective sense of situations in order to cope with a constantly changing world, and to creatively move forward. Detachment can be a useful preliminary means of preparing to experience the affective feel, tonality and meaning of a situation as a whole rather than getting stuck within one fixed conceptual detail of it.
I see your point, but in the context of Galilean physics, the emphasis was certainly on the measurable attributes of bodies and its delineation from Aristotelian notions of purpose and teleology. Hence the wrangling in American philosophy about 'qualia' as the qualitative attributes of being.
Quoting Joshs
What would 'immersing yourself' mean in practice? I interpret detachment more in line with what is taught in mindfulness-awareness training - that you are very much aware of the swirl of feelings, sensations and thoughts, without becoming carried into them or away by them. An analogy often given is the 'lotus effect' whereby water forms droplets on the leaf surface rather than the leaf becoming saturated by them. As quoted in the OP, Detachment is not that you should own nothing, but that nothing should own you.
Like the nothingness vs. no thingness divide which weve agreed upon in previous threads, detachment is a term which in at least the English language doesnt find a readily interpretable meaning for the spiritual (or spiritual-like) contexts in which it is employed. In other words, it doesnt translate well from its metaphysics-relative, intended meaning in Eastern languages.
I. for example, know of no Buddhist who advocates for the abolishment of compassion, this while upholding the ideal of we in English translate as detachment with the same breath. Compassion, in our English lexicon, however, can only be obtained via attachment: not only the occurrence of empathy (i.e., the sensing of what the other senses, something that one can hold for a disliked rival while in battle with them so as to best act and react to their actions) but also the occurrence of sympathy (i.e., earnest caring for what the other senses). Love of parents, children, romantic partners, the world at large, etc., is always a compassion for the X addressed. And, in common English understanding, this always then equates to an attachment toward that loved.
I believe that the full scope of detachment when explicitly expressed is detachment from maya (illusion). And maya, to my awareness, in either Hindu or Buddhist schools of Indian philosophy is never that which is considered the core aspect of subjectivity: the atman in Hindu philosophy; the anatman in Buddhist philosophy. The latter constituting that which is nonillusory reality per se in an ultimate metaphysical analysis of things.
Thought Id mention this given how common it is for westerners to associate detachment to utter unconcern, including relative to the welfare of other beings in general. In contrast to what many would think, and as you indirectly mention, detachment is not callousness. But, I think, rather the very opposite. Such that the Skeptic epoche and Stoic apatheia can make no sense, at least to me, in the absence of earnest compassion and its satisfaction with the conditions of not only oneself but of others which surround.
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Ps. None of which is to say that objectivity does not matter or is else unimportant.
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Pps. Written as a footnote to what you were saying. Hopefully nothing significantly controversial about it.
Excellent point! I have noticed in Mah?y?na Buddhism, there is a lovely expression, that emptiness and compassion are like the two wings of a bird - that realisation of emptiness leads to detachment, but that detachment without compassion (Karu??) is meaningless.
And of course, it is true that objectivity is vital, in many areas of life and many disciplines.
Thanks for that!
I agree with nearly everything you're saying (very well!) in Part 3. I would slow down a bit for the above, however. Can we differentiate between "consciousness" as a possible object of scientific knowledge, and "consciousness" as a lived experience of a particular subject? I think we can. Good science can remain noncommittal about subjective experience while pursuing an understanding of the Hard Problem. Chalmers isn't saying that solving the Hard Problem will require an objective account of what it's like to be a subject. He only (!) asks that we discover what consciousness is, and why it necessarily arises in the way that it does, and no other. Must we insist that only an account of subjectivity itself will answer this? I'm willing to give science a lot more leeway here.
What's key is your phrase "denying the reality of the subject." Obviously that is not what I mean by remaining noncommittal! Good science can and should acknowledge the experience of subjectivity, perhaps bracketing the question of the nature of this experience, which would leave room not only for philosophical description, but even for an argument à la Churchland and Dennett that the experience is an illusion.
Quoting Wayfarer
In what way are we not part of it? How is scientific objectivity any different from someone stating "that is a rock". Such statements share the same lack of meaning, but it's how we relate them which gives us hints of what is true to us.
Isn't the issue rather that people expect a truth to be "out there" and given to them in a packaging that also incorporates their emotional dimension.
Is this not just a matter of emotional evolution? That thousands of years of culture operating on the idea that an emotionally satisfying truth is "out there" and that we've ended up in a state in which we realize that it isn't.
Isn't it then up to us to evolve our emotional realm to effectively find an experience that is emotionally satisfying in relation to the cold facts that science have shown?
That the only thing that essentially happened in history is that we went from constructing fantasies about the stone having intrinsic meaning, some divine purpose, to concluding those fantasies to be false.
And that we now use science as a punching bag in order to blame it for removing the veil from our eyes.
Essentially, there are plenty of philosophies and even religions of the world which do not place us humans in arrogance over nature. Whose core ideas is about accepting ourselves to be a meaningless cog in the whole that is nature and the universe.
Science is closer to this kind of thinking than the monotheistic or pantheonic concepts of meaning. And I think the modern, non-religious person may need to study how they handled it.
Because I don't think it's a crisis of truth, but a crisis of emotional response to truth. We haven't evolved into viewing ourselves in the context of a purely scientific world view.
I also believe that there are less true atheists in the world than people think. I think that most people hold irrational beliefs even when saying they're non-believers.
We are basically unable to handle actual truth, because we've yet to live in a society where we all gather around such a construct and deal with the consequent emotions together, forming a social existence and culture in which the idea of meaning comes from us and our relation to truth, rather than something external informing us of what is.
Part 2
Quoting Wayfarer
While it is true that we are always required to experience the objective truths with our subjective mind, I'm not sure the definition of a scientist is this. Science communicators are usually closer to this bridge of explaining the truths of nature and the universe into a comprehensible subjective construct that we use to understand the world around us, but a scientist can also be the one who sift through raw data and mathematically discover something that does not have any interpretational properties. How one equation connects and intersect with another is not able to exist as a subjective experience, it is simply pure logic.
Quoting Wayfarer
I would say that the study of consciousness, in some form, bridge the two. It's filled with cold facts that informs a subjective interpretation about the very object that is interpreting. If anything, the study becomes self-aware, while still operating as a naturalist science.
This feedback loop can be jarring for many people. I've experienced it myself while studying the nature of prediction coding in relation to experience; how our brain operate and take action before our conscious awareness of it. Thinking deep about this, meditating on it, it effectively making me aware of that process happening can trigger an almost panic attack as my mind is trying to consciously focus on the process while its happening.
It becomes an object of study that at the same time is subjectively experiencing itself being studied. And that feedback loop gets consciously loud.
Part 3
Quoting Wayfarer
Is it though? Or is the objective truth and reality being attributed with a need for meaning to the point that we define objective truth by parameters that we shouldn't? That in the desperation for meaning by the lack of religious and spiritual explanations, rather than accepting scientific objectivity for what it is, we demand of it to give us meaning, to the point of blaming it for not being able to.
That when we learn that the stone does not have some given external divine purpose and meaning, we demand of the stone itself to give us meaning. Rather than just accepting the stone for what it is, and define our qualitive dimension of existence by the fact of simply existing with it and in our symbiosis with it as part of nature.
That the role of scientific objectivity has never been to give us meaning, it has never had that purpose in the first place. It has always been about the discovery of function and truth. How things operate, what is true beyond our subjectivity.
And that the unintentional consequence was that it proved our religion and spiritual concepts and ideas to be false and fantasies.
To put in perspective... if scientific objectivity, if scientific research arrived at a conclusion that aligned with religion and spiritualism, that there is a place after death, a meaning to the universe and our existence, and that we actually found it.
How would you then think of scientific objectivity in relation to meaning and our subjective qualitative dimension of existence?
And now, think of what science actually did and ask yourself if there's any difference? Did it not open up a new realm of meaning? That it showed us how false narratives in religion were constructed for other reasons and that the meaning we felt in society was built on lies and fiction, of ideas of power and control? In essence, the meaning we had was false, it was a lie. And scientific objective answers have opened a door for us to actually find true meaning, not by giving an answer to what it is, but by dismantling our ability to lie to ourselves, to form false narratives that give ourselves a delusional false meaning.
In essence, does scientific objectivity actually exclude us from the qualitative dimension of existence? Or is it freeing us up to truly find it?
Quoting Wayfarer
Isn't this merely due to the fact that there were no actual modern forms of science that concluded the spiritual to be false, and so the inability to detach from the spiritual and religious, affected the way many philosophical inquiries were done?
Yet we also still had logic in philosophy, which do try to detach from the subjective, transforming a concept into a form of mathematical rigor.
Quoting Wayfarer
I'd argue that stoicism is a form of desperate detachment out of fear of engagement. Rather than engaging in passion with the implications of something, in this topic, scientific objective truths, the fear of these answers dismantling a sense of meaning leads to a forced detachement in an attempt to subdue the emotions this realization of reality brings.
While I agree that the ability to not attach oneself to specific opinions is good, I'd rather argue for being able to hold conflicting ideas within one larger holistic construct without attaching it to ones identity as a person. The stoic approach is to subdue emotion because it risks infecting opinions with what is emotionally good or bad, but that's a failure of agency over emotion, not the emotions themselves.
If you are also arguing for the subjective experience and its symbiosis with scientific objectivity as a preferred state of being, then is stoicism really the answer or is it merely placing you in a position where you have no real subjective experience of scientific objectivity left, rather than actually having emotions out of the implications of scientific objective facts.
What I mean is that if your goal is to find how to live with a sense of meaning in a world built on scientific objectivity, then detachement from emotion is rather the opposite.
I would argue that objective science is no answer to meaning and it never has been; it is simply a statement of the natural state of nature and the universe. The byproduct of it all was that it showed religious and spiritual concepts to be false as their meaning was merely constructs made by humans into false senses of meanings. Science or objectivity isn't to blame for this, it was a mere consequence of where the questions led us.
Scientific objectivity didn't rob us of meaning, it never intended to give us such things in the first place. It just showed us that the meaning we believed in was false and the emotions that came out of that is like the message of someone's death. A great loss. But the solution isn't to subdue emotions, it's to embrace emotions. To find our feelings in front of that stone, to let our subjective self experience the beauty of it, regardless of how meaningless it is.
Scientific objectivity doesn't conflict with our subjective self. It was never in opposition to it in the first place. We lived in subjective relation to the concepts of religion and spirituality, but now we live in subjective relation to nature and the universe as it is. I'd wonder, what is really the difference other than a frame of reference?
Quoting Wayfarer
Immersing involves a kind of openness or sensitivity toward the evolving felt senses of situations. We only run the danger of being carried away or owned by our feelings and thoughts when we reify them, isolate and unitize them into this and only this. We cut ourselves off from the meaningful whole context of feeling and thought when we do this. We should detach ourselves from the detached concepts and feelings we get ourselves stuck in, in order to get the situation moving again. But there is no way to detach ourselves from the whole situation, since it is only from out of the actual context of situations that a notion like detachment gets its sense. The aim of a holistic grasp of our comportment toward the world that matters to us is to allow the whole to change , so as to allow new possibilities. Grasping the whole makes a change in it, just as all awareness changes what it surveys. We prevent the world from owning us so that we can allow ourselves to be transformed by it. There is no sovereign standpoint of peaceful serenity above the fray, any more than there can be a standpoint of knowledge that lies outside of our contingent involvements within the world.
Quoting J
This is kind of a mess. The very presuppositions making the hard problem a problem at all are all on display in Chalmers split between inner experience and objective science. So his attempts at a solution take the form of freezing in place this split and then trying to glue the two halves together in some fashion or other ( such as panpsychism). What is needed is not a solution but a dissolution. The first step is to stop thinking of consciousness as something inside a subject and the world as outside. Consciousness is the processes of interaction by which both world and subject are revealed, and a science of consciousness which avoids being stuck on one side or other of the Hard Problem needs to
be neither subjective nor objective but beyond this split. This is where enactivist approaches excel.
Zahavi, one proponent of enactivism, argues:
For instance? The only example that stands out to me is Albert Camus.
Quoting Christoffer
The 'comprehensive subjective construct' sounds much like Kuhn's use of 'paradigm', a framework of scientific practice that defines the accepted theories, methods, and assumptions within a given scientific community.
Scientists, I'm sure, and scientific instruments, sift massive amounts of raw data today - I mean, the amounts of data generated by the LHC and the James Webb are almost incomprehensibly enormous. But surely the aim is always to integrate the data with the hypothesis, or alternatively develop new hypotheses to account for any anomalous data. What would something 'without any interpretational properties' be, in that context? And what would it mean? The difference between 'data' and 'information' is precisely that the latter means something. So if you mean by that data which does not have interpretational properties, then how could that mean anything? Wouldn't it just be the white noise, meaningless data, that is to be sifted out?
Quoting Christoffer
You're not seeing the broader epistemological point at issue. Modern scientific method begins in exclusion, idealisation and abstraction. It is an intellectual and practical methodology for framing what kinds of questions are meaningful to explore and what to exclude, and what kinds of factors ought to be taken into account in framing and exploring them. As I explain in Section One, The Cartesian Division, central to that method is the division of res cogitans, mind, and extensa, matter, on the one side, and primary attributes of bodies on one side, opposed to the secondary attributes, on the other. That is a construct. It is not and could never be 'naturally occuring' or 'part of nature'. It is thoroughly grounded in the acknowledged and conscious separateness from nature on the part of the scientist.
So what you're saying is tantamount to asking 'hey, what if the James Webb discovered Heaven out there amongst the stars? Wouldn't that change your attitude to science?' Your question is based on misconstruing the premise of the argument. You're looking through scientific method, not at it (which also applies to @Philosophim).
Quoting Christoffer
Not a credible criticism, based on any dispassionate reading of the texts.
Quoting Christoffer
...it became evident that the self is a mental construct
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Quoting Joshs
I don't think that conveys the sense of philosophical detachment that is implicit in the traditional sources, Stoic and others. I think they too had an intuitive sense of the sense in which 'the world' is a mental construct, and how the attachment to sense-pleasures, possessions and identity is inimical to peace of mind.
Agree with Zahavi.
Discourse, as with a rich Persian carpet,
Can only be shown by extending it,
Spreading the beauteous figures and shapes,
Inviting speech offerings into it.
Back to the tavern, its drinks calling,
Where the inquisitive sit, pondering
One and another says, Weve some questions,
For weve all been born here without asking.
The scroll writes itself, my wondering friends,
Having not any plan unto its ends,
In this life borrowed from death that it lends,
So we know not how the veil weaves and wends.
Lifes object must be mental happiness,
For thoughts are all we can think, feel, or sense;
Aim for this euphoric state of well-being,
For true paradise is a state of mind.
Quoting Joshs
Yes, but only to some beings. These processes do not occur for a grain of sand (again, leaving aside strong arguments for panpsychism). Chalmers wants to know why, as do I.
They're my feelings, also. I'm learning a lot from the readings of the various postmodernist philosophers, but I don't share with them the distrust of the meta-narrative. I see life as being utterly embedded in one. (Note to self - dig out Huston Smith's essay in The Truth about the Truth, Walt Anderson.)
I prefer them to your waffles. :wink:
Quoting Wayfarer
Where do you think Thompson stands on this issue? He came out in The Blind Spot as opposed to postmodernism:
And yet, I dont see him as embracing meta-narratives. If he could find a way to extend the principles of living self-organizing systems backwards to encompass the inorganic I think he would. John Protevi, in his paper DELEUZE, JONAS, AND THOMPSON: TOWARD A NEW TRANSCENDENTAL AESTHETIC AND A NEW QUESTION OF PANPSYCHISM suggested a way this could be done.
I'll try and find time to read that paper.
The 'metanarrative' I see life as embedded in, is what Buddhists call sa?s?ra - the cycle of birth and death, extending back into an unknowably distant past. I think I'm on board with that. Concommitant to it is the promise of release from Sa?s?ra, meaning going beyond it, not being entangled in it in future lives. Again, I'm tentatively open to that, although maybe not completely convinced or cognisant of its meaning, but the salient point is, I think 'enlightenment' (or the original term from which that was translated was 'bodhi') does indeed mean 'seeing things truly' or 'things as they really are'. We'll get to that in the next part!
Quoting Wayfarer
Thompson seems to have struggled his whole life with how to unite Western philosophy, empirical science and Buddhist insights in a way that doesnt lead to the domination of any one of these traditions over the others. Its clear that what he has been steadfast about from the beginning of his career is that Buddhist insights concerning conscious awareness are an indispensable complement to philosophical and empirical approaches. But he wants to treat these insights as neither methodologically scientific nor as necessarily tied to specific ethical or religious commitments. This is why he can do science but not privilege scientific approaches to truth over non-scientific ones, and why he can depend on Buddhist knowledge but not consider himself a Buddhist.
Indeed, and ataraxia is the first 'medicine' Lady Philosophy gives to Boethius in the Consolation, although this is preparatory to the Ascent. Even if detachment is not the end goal, it and nipsis (watchfulness, the "guarding of the intellect/heart") are often seen as prerequisites for hesychasm (stillness), henosis, fanaa, and illumination/gnosis.
Part IV: Detachment East
Interestingly, the Stoic concept of the Logos bears a striking resemblance to the Chinese notion of the Tao, the Way. Both represent a fundamental principle of order and harmony underlying and animating both Nature and the Cosmos. Just as the Stoics believed that living in accordance with the Logos brings freedom and equanimity, so too does the Tao emphasize flowing with the natural order of things, free from attachment to personal desires or rigid expectations.
While the Tao is often associated with Daoism, its influence also extends into Chan (Chinese) and Zen (Japanese) Buddhism, where detachment takes on a uniquely contemplative and meditative dimension. Zen emphasizes direct experience and letting go of conceptual thought to grasp reality as it truly is which in Buddhist terminology is called yath?bh?ta?.
Accordingly, an invocation of serene detachment is made in the famous Zen poem Hsin Hsin Min, from the Third Patriarch of Zen, the first stanza of which reads:
This principle of detachment goes back to the earliest Buddhist texts, where philosophical views and opinions are described as writhings and thickets of views, and virtue obtains in the relinquishing of views. And, since the first step on the Eightfold Path is samma ditthi, right view, it turns out that right view is no view, in the sense of not holding to opinions or arguing for philosophical positions. The Buddha denies holding views about questions normally considered essential to philosophy, such as whether the Universe is eternal or infinite, or not, or whether the soul is the same or different to the body. In this dialogue from the early Buddhist texts, the questioner asks:
This is an expression of the understanding of emptiness, ??nyat?, often mis-translated as the void, but in reality, again resonant with the phenomenological epoch?, the suspension of judgement:
The point of this, and the element that Buddhism and phenomenology have in common, is paying close attention to or having mindful awareness of the qualities and attributes of experience and sensation as they arise and fall away. It is having the clarity of awareness to see each moment of experience as it is. Buddhist meditation is a way of amplfying or magnifying that close attention to the nature of lived existence, moment by moment. It is insight into that process which deconstructs the habitual sense of oneself. This is not by any means a simple or trivial undertaking, and indeed in Buddhist cultures, is the basis of an entire way-of-being, emphasising the virtue of renounciation and compassion as the way to detachment from purely personal concerns.
and West
The supreme value of detachment was often the subject of the sermons of the famed Meister Eckhart. A medieval monastic and mystic, Eckhart is a seminal figure in the history of spiritual philosophy, who challenged prevailing norms to the point where towards the end of his life, he was accused of heresy but whose insights have been prized by generations of seekers since his day. His reflections on detachment (Gelassenheit) reveal a profound understanding of transcendence and freedom from ego, resonating across spiritual traditions.
Conclusion
Its important to re-state that nothing in the above should be taken to deprecate the scientific method, which has proven extraordinarily powerful in ways that our pre-modern forbears could not have even imagined. But, as the saying has it, with great power comes great responsibility, and theres an important sense in which an over-reliance on objectivity enables us to sidestep many larger questions about the nature and meaning of our own existence. Objective judgement, you might say, has a shadow side.
Science was born out of the quest for Truth, capital T, yet the fascination with its powers and potentialities can sometimes obscure larger questions of meaning. Philosophical detachment, the wellspring of scientific objectivity, offers a more expansive perspective one that embraces our existence as living beings, inextricably connected to the world we seek to understand. By marrying the rigor of objectivity with the wisdom of detachment, we may find a more holistic way to see things as they truly are, enriching both our knowledge and our humanity.
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11. The Great Way (retrieved 14th Jan 2025)
12. Aggi-Vachagotta Sutta MN72
13. What is Emptiness?Bhikkhu Thanissaro
14. Meister Eckhardt: On Detachment
It is not the business of science to study the lived experience of subjects. That is the province of phenomenology, leaving aside the question of whether it delivers coherently and usefully on that. The epoche in phenomenology (bracketing the question of the existence of an external world) is the methodological counterpart to science's bracketing of questions about subjective experience. Those questions simply aren't relevant to the practice of the natural sciences.
I agree with most of what you say there, except for your characterization of the Stoics. I have been interested in and read the main works of the Stoics for years and I see their basic philosophy as being very simpleworry about what you can change and learn not to worry about what you cannot change. It is a philosophy of the inevitable, it posits no afterlife or immortality for us (just as the Epicureans do not) and rather counsels personal acceptance of mortality and all its attendant rigors as the way to peace of mind.
Subjectivity is the principle which relies on one's own perception and reasoning for the knowledge of the world in understanding. In subjective mind, what appears in perception and sensation are most important things in knowledge.
Objectivity is the principle which relies on their imagination and faith on what other folks supposed to have discovered for their knowledge and understanding of the world. Most of the objective knowledge comes from the books, media and the words of mouths from other folks.
The point is that they need to work together, but subjectivity precedes objectivity.
Buddhist traditions, Shinto tradition, American Native traditions. After some searching there's also stuff like Neo-Druidism, Animism.
For philosophy, Schopenhauer, Heidegger, in some forms Rousseau as well.
The primary thing is something that I touched upon in another thread:
Quoting Christoffer
Primarily that we struggle with these things because there's no really good attempts to form a cultural movement for such thinking and structuring of society. We have basically let the free market replace it all with materialism, rather than engaging with existentialism honestly and with a purpose. If the existentialists brought up the questions and examined the nihilism post-religion, there's now time for a practical solution that formulate a practice for non-religious people. It's like people are unable to think about how contemplation, meditation, guidance and similar practices essentially have no belief system at their core, but we've surrendered all such questions to religious practice, while attempting to medicate it away for any non-religious who suffers. It's either follow religion or you're on your own, which is a root cause for much existential suffering today.
Quoting Wayfarer
In mathematics, a solution to a long held mathematical problem is at its core not really up for interpretation or a subjective experience. The logic derives from how it intertwines with the problem and its implications for other mathematical equations. The subjective meaning of it becomes somewhat illusive, how do you subjectively experience a math problem or solution? Some mathematicians so versed in thinking about these things experience some solutions and define them as "beautiful", even though there's no actual interpretational difference between a non-mathematician and them viewing the thing. That meaning for them of being "beautiful" is also not relevant in order to explain or define the equation, so while there's a subjective experience, it's not required to engage with the information/data of the specific equation.
And many things in science has their hypothesis derive from something other than subjective interpretation. One conclusion from a set of experiments becomes a new hypothesis out of the logic it implies rather than a subjective mind interpreting it. Or we have AIs structuring and looking for patterns looking for a context we aren't yet aware of.
In essence, much of science aims to reduce as much subjective interpretations as possible. While much is of course needed in order to do actual research, I do think that what most people read and hear about when engaging with scientific literature, is a scientific communicator who's job it is to transfer the complexity of a field and making it understandable for common people or people in power. Their job is basically to subjectively interpret science into understandable concepts, into a form of storytelling.
But returning to the the mathematician finding an equation "beautiful", I think that kind of subjective reaction is close to what I'm talking about. That a scientific objective fact, a pure logic without any actual emotional values built into it, still manage to give a sense of "beauty", due to its elegance in the mind of the mathematician. It's a meaning derived from and out of a cold fact, that is for that mathematician just as emotionally valid as a meaning attached through religion. It's hinting at how there's a possibility of finding a meaning in the meaningless, without fully having to surrender to the absurd.
Quoting Wayfarer
You excluded the second part of it:
Quoting Christoffer
My point was that science can't provide meaning, because it was never meant to do or have that purpose. It primarily began within the hall of religion, argued out of faith, but it, by the nature of the method, began dismantling religious belief and the meaning people previously found there.
And so it removed our blindfold and put the demand on us to find meaning. That's where our subjective experience comes in. If science had proven the premises stated by religion, it would have confirmed that there was a meaning beyond this realm, but it didn't and instead society formed a culture around science in opposition to religion. Science in opposition to meaning. It became a scapegoat and responsible for robbing society of meaning, even though it was never there to provide it or had any intention to do so.
Fundamentally, if the question is how scientific objectivity never accounts for the qualitative experience of the subjective and risk throwing people into nihilism, I'd argue that it frames scientific objectivity in a relation to that experience that it did not have to begin with. The reason for nihilism and the loss of meaning comes out of the same type of inability to think about something like a complex immoral act, not just scientific objectivity.
A complex immoral act exist within the subjective interpretation of our existence already, and is presenting a dilemma to our morality. It produces similar nihilistic experiences of a lacking meaning, even without relating to scientific objectivity. It's about uncertainty, not our relation to objective truth.
It's not the relation between scientific objectivity and how it describes the world, and our subjective experience that produces this lack of meaning, it's the basic relation between a lack of answers and our need for answers. It's just that the consequences of scientific objectivity has been the largest historical introduction of lacking answers on the existential level.
This argument is two-part on your end, because on one side you're dealing with the question of science's inability to find meaning for us and the other is how to essentially cope with that.
But science never had the purpose of finding meaning for us and deconstruction of our subjective need for meaning has more to do with our lack of ability to formulate a meaning within the realm of these objective facts. That doesn't mean it's about scientific objectivity itself, it's only about our relation to uncertainty in the wake of a previous certainty rendered false.
The issue is that I'm not sure all parts of your argument follow each other. First, you have an argument for how the subjective experience is distinctly different from scientific objectivity, which I don't think anyone would disagree on. That our experience of the stone is not the stone itself.
But how does that relate to our struggle with a lack of meaning when that lack of meaning isn't due to scientific objectivity, but rather the consequence of society learning religion was false?
Our sense of lack of meaning is related to a similar emotional reactions of being betrayed. Like a friend we trusted turning out having used our trust for their own gain. And we feel anger against the one who revealed this fact to us. And now we're trying to find our place in the new order of things.
And that's where I argue for dismantling religion away from beliefs, gods, spiritualism and discern practices that does not require belief to be good and mentally healthy for us; focusing on accepting existence for what it is and find a sense of meaning in that meaninglessness. Not to accept the absurd, but to be able to honestly look into the universe and nature and accept it for what it is, to find it meaningful as it is, in that objective nature. Not to demand more meaning than it is capable of. A harmony with nature and the universe without suppressing emotions or trying to manipulate our own perspective in order to cope.
Quoting Wayfarer
It's generally speaking, condensed down. The suppression of emotions becomes an inauthentic living, opposite to Heidegger. It's generally an alienating view in which the self detach itself, suppress itself thinking that gives harmony. But everyone feels a form of harmony through ignoring certain peaks of emotions and distancing. But it's a false sensation as the authentic experience of our emotions and engagement with the world, nature and the universe is suppressed.
And the reason it has a surging today is because it aligns with societal values of detachement. It's being used by influencers and crypto bros and people like that to justify ignoring any consequences of their behavior. And its focus on individualism aligns with the ideals of the self-made man, forming his own destiny, gaining his own wealth. The surge is because of the fundamental surge in a focus on the ego. Laissez-faire stoic ideology basically. I don't see people actually engaging with stoicism for real, it's part of their 12 steps to success strategies.
So why is stoicism your answer to solving the lack of meaning? Or giving us the ability to see beyond the subjective? Is stoicism needed in order to see past emotion or is a true, deep and authentic understanding of ones emotion equally or even more suited to experience beyond the subjective?
The mathematician knows his feeling of the equation being beautiful isn't defining the reality of it. He knows where the line is drawn between his experience and the objective. Is your argument focused on them who are unable to discern where this line is drawn? I'd say that's merely a confusion in the wake of religion dying, not an authentic existence in harmony with objective reality.
In the end, it seems to be about coping rather than harmony.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, the self is a construct. But I would go further and argue that our mental construct is just a byproduct and emergent factor of a biological entity. We aren't even in control of this construct, we are just given an emotional experience that we are, an illusion that isn't even experienced by an acting will, the illusion and the one experiencing it is one and the same. But that's a whole other topic.
I see no difference between that and many self help strategies. Which is what I think is a problem with stoicism. It's easily adopted as methods for coping with a meaningless existence, but the detachement behaves like denial. I'd rather live in authentic emotion, in honest harmony with nature and people around me; constantly learning knowledge to distinguish my irrational emotions from my rational ones.
What point is there to detachment if there's no emotion to experience the resulting tranquility? There is no peak without a valley.
I see more stoics eventually falling into existential crisis than those who gain knowledgeable reflection to guide emotion.
A stoic approach is good for helping others as it is a good behavior for giving knowledge, but for the self it is suppressing an honesty towards existence. Emotion is part of our very being, but its the inability to understand and channel emotion properly that is the problem, not that we feel.
The idea of not worrying about what you cannot change also ends up being ignorant for fixing issues of the world. It's easy to end up in a state of not caring. Emotions about what feels like cannot be changed is often a drive into innovation that do change.
The stoic approach becomes a passive setback. In terms of the world today, many adopted stoicism in face of climate change as a way to basically live by that quote; most of climate change feels like you cannot change, so don't worry about it, it is inevitable.
In my opinion, there are better ways to find harmony and balance with existence that doesn't rely on such forms of detachement, and which is better for the self and humanity at large.
In a timely manner to what I wrote, this thing popped up. While as a non-believer I don't ascribe to the religious and spiritual undertones, it speaks towards the other things I've touched upon; the need for a sense of harmony with everything that is objectively outside of us, and that the solution is for our subject to find this harmony, not to suppress ourselves into merely becoming an objective object that fades into the background.
This seems a little too conclusive to me, but it basically affirms what I was suggesting about separating the two senses of "consciousness." I just think we have to be careful about putting limits on what science can or can't do. There's a natural tendency to regard "science" as meaning "everything we know now, which is all there is to know." A moment's reflection shows how wrong this must be; why would we imagine we have reached the End of Science? Or that we have the conceptual equipment to declare what science must be? So I'm willing to keep an open mind on whether both 21st-century science and phenomenology may one day be shown as antiquated descriptions of a much deeper understanding of reality -- one which, in 25th-century (e.g.) terminology, is understood to be scientific.
Being more versed in the classics, what do you think an example, the chronological forerunner, of the modern(-ish) principle of induction would be, which says there can be no empirical discovery of capital T truth?
And given that the quest for is very far from a determination of, with respect to capital T truth ..I think it better said that science was born out of the incessant yet never entirely sufficient, not so much the comprehension of Nature, but comprehension of the human beings relation to it.
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Quoting Wayfarer
As expected, well done. From this particular armchair, comes from it: the more the attempt to eliminate the explicit duality of human intelligence, the more the immersion in it. From which follows the general justification, detachment from objectivity doesnt work.
Oh. And please, pass the syrup?
What does "capital T truth" mean? I hear that phrase a lot but I never know what it means.
Quoting Wayfarer
FYI, Eckhart was a Dominican, not a monastic. The monastics mostly hated the new mendicant Orders. In fact he was a scholastic who served two terms at the University of Paris as a magisterthe first to do so since Aquinas. He is one example of the confluence of mysticism and scholasticism.
What do you mean "no emotion to experience the resulting tranquility"? Who says there is no emotion for the Stoic? For example, say you love nature, and you enjoy nothing more than immersing yourself in its beauties. Say it's a peak experience for youwhere is the valley (meaning downside not actual valley) in that?
Quoting Christoffer
The Stoic advocates learning to let go of concern over those things which cannot be changed. Things like death, illness, loss of loved ones. It doesn't mean you won't feel fear, pain or sorrowit means that you accept those emotions as inevitable toowe cannot change how we feel, but perhaps we can let go of tendencies to excessively indulge such emotions out of addictive feelings of self-pity.
As to social change, why should I not work to better my circumstances and the circumstances of others if that is what interest me? On the other hand, what would be the point of working towards something I know is impossible to achieve?
You are misunderstanding and misrepresenting the Stoic message. I doubt you have read much of the works of the Stoics.
Quoting J
I don't know what led you to think I was suggesting that we have reached the "end of Science". We know what science consists in as it is practiced. It basically consists in observing, examining and analyzing what our senses reveal to us of the world. It is inherently a "third person" endeavour. Subjective experience cannot be the subject of science because it is not an observable entity or process.
Phenomenology attempts to deal rigorously with subjective experience. Whether it can achieve that is arguable. I'm not ruling it out. The real point at issue for @Wayfarer is the possibility of "direct knowledge" or intellectual intuition. Is it possible to have such knowledge of reality? Obviously, he believes it is possible, and that some humans have achieved such enlightenment. The problem is that if it is possible, you would have no way of knowing that unless you had achieved it yourself.
And even then, how could you rule out the possibility of self-delusion? What kind if argument could possibly show that such knowledge is possible, in fact not merely possible, but real for some? It could not be an argument based on empirical evidence, and it could not be a purely logical argument either. What other kind of argument is there? Personal conviction cannot be intersubjectively justificatory for anything.
I'm not ruling out the possibility of a "much deeper understanding of reality", but I have no idea what it could look like, and if it were not based on empirical evidence or logic, then what else could it be based on? In any case it would not be science as we now understand science. People who think like Wayfarer believe that such an understanding existed more in the past than it does today, but they would not call it science, unless by 'science' is intended something like the original meaning of simply 'knowing'.
The person who claims to have that sort of knowledge propounds theses that are not accessible to the current paradigm, and if those theses are verified then you have evidence for their knowledge. This is the same way any new paradigm establishes itself.
More simply: special abilities signify special knowledge or special faculties. All they have to do is demonstrate the abilities.
For example, think about the way that the FBI will leverage psychics in difficult cases, and the way in which they have certain psychics who have a good track record, and whom they trust to provide aid in their investigations. There is no intrinsic barrier to the FBI using a psychic to help in an investigation, even though the FBI agents are not themselves psychics and are not able to reproduce the psychic's method.
Someone who thinks the FBI couldn't possibly use psychics may well reflect J's theory:
Quoting J
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Quoting Janus
To say that we know what is and isn't science with some sort of perfect certainty implies that one thinks there can be no further scientific paradigm shifts. That mindset occurs in every age ...at least until the next scientific paradigm shift.
That topic being nihilism ;-)
I see your point about faux stoicism but its also a pretty cynical take. I dont think you can paint everyone with the same brush, although that is something you tend to do. Besides, Stoicism was introduced to make a rhetorical point, that being the recognition of philosophical detachment, which is far from the Freudian 'suppression of libido' that you're depicting it as.
As to Buddhism and Shinto believing were cogs In a meaningless machine - couldnt be further from the truth. That is the condition which the whole point of the essay seeks to ameliorate. That way of thinking was completely alien to them.
Quoting Mww
Im barely versed in the classics! Im acutely aware of the sketchiness of my knowledge about them. But that question is distinctly Kantian, isnt it? Kant crystallises a train of thought which had been developing in the centuries prior.
The deeper background idea behind this specific essay is the one we touched on briefly the other day - the idea of 'union of knower and known'. Please see this post in the thread that was spawned from this one, with the passage from Eric Perl's 'Thinking Being'. It ends with:
Quoting Leontiskos
The kind that is aspired to. Possesses a living quality, of the kind that imparts itself to the seer and the seeker. As in, 'you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.'
Quoting Leontiskos
So, a 'mendicant' rather than a 'monastic' - a differentiation I was insufficiently aware of. Thanks for the clarification.
If those "theses" cannot be confirmed by logical or emprical evidence, then how will they be confirmed? Have such theses been justified in the past? Can you give an example?
If someone claims to have special knowledge, and that knowledge is in no way confirmable by any other person, then their knowledge cannot be confirmed. But that case seems like it would be quite rare.
For example, if an ancient philosopher claimed to have knowledge of an eclipse, and the eclipse occurred when they said it would, then their knowledge was confirmable. All we have to do is check and see if the eclipse occurs at the predicted time. It's pretty straightforward, and if the current science holds that predicting eclipses is impossible, then the successful prediction counts as evidence against that scientific paradigm.
Yes, but that is empirical knowledge. We were discussing the confirmability of so-called "direct knowledge" or intellectual intuition I thought.
Who's to say that he doesn't know it directly? I could have direct knowledge that some future event will occur, and this would in no way preclude the future occurrence from being verified. Direct knowledge and empirical confirmation are not mutually exclusive.
I'm not sure if you saw my edit above:
Quoting Leontiskos
My point is that the sage who has insight into the true nature of reality will be able to do verifiable things that most people cannot do. This is exactly what happened with ancient philosophers and eclipses. If you don't think that same thing can happen today, then it seems you do think we have reached the end of science. ...that if our scientific rules preclude some form of knowledge, then that form of knowledge is simply impossible because our scientific rules are final. Every scientific age ends when it is learned that the science was not as final as was believed.
What's the point?
You don't really want to summarize. I get it.
I don't blame you. You can't be bothered.
Yeah, I suppose it is. Maybe more Hume-ian. I was just looking for some background the easy way, is all.
My big-picture view is somewhat like those historians of ideas who see the collective consciousness of h.sapiens evolving through, and associated with, distinct epochs. Accordingly different cultural forms have associated forms of consciousness, of which modernity is one. And one that is very hard to be aware of because we're so embedded within it.
One of the themes within this framework is the idea of the participatory cosmos and participatory knowing. That's why I called attention to that post by @Count Timothy von Icarus in the other thread. I'll quote a section of it here as it's relevant to the OP:
[quote=Thinking Being, Eric Perl, p 8-9] The key insight of phenomenology is that the modern interpretation of knowledge as a relation between consciousness as a self-contained subject and reality as an object extrinsic to it is incoherent. On the one hand, consciousness is always and essentially the awareness of something, and is thus always already together with being. On the other hand, if being is to mean anything at all, it can only mean that which is phenomenal, that which is so to speak there for awareness, and thus always already belongs to consciousness. ....
Consciousness is the grasping of being; being is what is grasped by consciousness. The phenomenological term for the first of these observations is intentionality; for the second, givenness. The mind is a moment to the world and the things in it; the mind is essentially correlated with its objects. The mind is essentially intentional. There is no problem of knowledge or problem of the external world, there is no problem about how we get to extramental reality, because the mind should never be separated from reality from the beginning. Mind and being are moments to each other; they are not pieces that can be segmented out of the whole to which they belong. Intended as an exposition of Husserlian phenomenology, these words hold true for the entire classical tradition from Parmenides to Aquinas. While this may seem a new and striking insight to those for whom philosophy begins with, say, Descartes, or who approach even ancient philosophy from a modern perspective, it is in fact largely a recovery of the classical vision, a recovery that would scarcely be needed had that vision not been lost in the first place.[/quote]
Emphasis added.
Many thanks for the commentary, but I must say, Im no more a fan of phenomenology than I ever was. While I understand it was never your intention to convert anyone, but merely to present evidence for it, I dont feel Im missing much of significant import, especially with respect to that which held true for the entire classical tradition ., of which Im not a member.
Would you mind saying a little about why?
Ehhhh .its just me; I never graduated from the continental German Enlightenment paradigm on the one hand, and never gave .never saw a reason to give .post-Kantian speculative metaphysics due diligence on the other.
To put a finer point on it, while admitting a somewhat incomplete grasp of phenomenology proper, that of it I do understand, has already been accounted for in Kants objective unity of self-consciousness.
While it may be perfectly valid in phenomenology that .consciousness is the grasping of being , I prefer that the grasping of being should belong to understanding.
.Consciousness as a self-contained subject . seems better said with ego as the self-contained subject, ego representing the totality of all those representations of which the self-contained subject would be conscious.
Im not in any position to deny the validity of phenomenology, while reserving the purely subjective right to ignore it.
But you're begging the question of your own paradigm again. The question is whether you would think they have knowledge you don't understand if they could make accurate predictions, but you had no idea how. That means you do not understand them to be using "observation and calculation," which are the tools of your own scientific paradigm. Again, see my references to the FBI psychics above.
From above:
Quoting Janus
The effects of the knowledge show that it is possessed, in the way of a sign. If someone can make an accurate prediction then this is a sign that they had knowledge of the future. This holds even if you have no idea how they obtained such knowledge. Your idea that it is impossible to provide evidence for non-standard forms of knowledge is simply not true.
(the second being from an Eckhart quote and not your own words)
It so far seems to me that to have compassion for others and the world at large one must necessarily hold opinions of what is right and wrong, of what is just, etc., and, furthermore, that via compassion one must become moved - if not into action then at the very least into personal sorrow - by the injustice-resulting sorrows of others in the world.
Going back to what was previously mentioned in relation to detachment and compassion:
If detachment is taken to equate to a) a lack of views being the "right view' and b) immovability (be it regarding physical action or psychological sentiment) by joys and sorrows, etc., then how do you understand a detachment from the world to coincide with a compassion for the world (and, obviously, hence for those from which the world is constituted)?
(To be clear, here with an explicit understanding of the world as the subjective human experience, regarded collectively.)
If someone could make, not just one or two accurate predictions, but could consistently make accurate predictions that were not based on observation and calculation, then we might assume they had some hidden way of knowing what will happen. I know of no such case, so it is just speculation, unless you can present a well-documented case.
And this talk about testable predictions is shifting the goalposts anyway, because the question is about purported direct knowledge of the nature and meaning of reality and being and of life, purported knowledge which has been claimed by different 'sages' and mystics in different cultures throughout history, and right up to the present. The claims they make are not testable predictions, and nor are they logically self-evident, so how are we to assess the veracity of what is claimed by them?
Quoting javra
Going back to the sources of the 'writhings and thickets of views' quote, it is set forth in this text. It starts with:
The questioner asks a series of similar questions, all of which concern what today would be called metaphysical questions, and each of which the Buddha declines to answer. Finally, the questioner asks:
This is related to the well-known 'poison arrow' simile, in which it is said that preoccupation with philosophical questions, such as those posed by the questioner, draw attention away from the real problem, which is pressing and urgent:
There's more, but this conveys the general meaning. So what comes across is that 'opinions' or 'views' about questions such as whether the universe is eternal or not, whether the soul is identical to the body or not, whether the Buddha continues to exist after death or not, are all put to one side, as it were. The pressing task is always to discern the causal chain of dependent origination which is at work in the body and mind, and that is not subject to opinion, it is operating quite impersonally whatever opinion one holds.
As for compassion - it might be recalled that part of the Buddhist mythos is that, after realising supreme enlightenment, the Buddha was inclined to retreat into anonymity and say nothing further about it, but for the intervention of Brahma, who begged him to teach 'out of compassion for the suffering of the world' - which the Buddha then agreed to do.
But it also might be added that later Buddhism put a greater emphasis on compassion, in that the aim of the Buddhist aspirant was not for his/her own liberation, but that of all others. I think it's also a generally understood fact that seeing through one's own illusions and self-centredness naturally gives rise to a greater sense of empathy which begins to spontaneously arise as a consequence.
Quoting Janus
There are themes and insights that are discernable in many different schools of philosophical and religious thought. When you say these are not 'testable', in fact, they are, insofar as generations of aspirants, students and scholars have endeavoured to practice them and live according to those lights, in the laboratory of life, so to speak. As for 'assessing the results of practice', there is an often-quoted Buddhist text on that question, the Kalama Sutta:
The claim that some techniques work to change consciousness is not in dispute. I know this from personal experience both with meditation, art practice and hallucinogens. I'm questioning the metaphysical ideas that often accompany such practices, the claims to know by direct insight the true nature of reality and the meaning of life.
We've been over this before.
Ah, I see you've just added the last sentence, which does go toward answering my question regarding detachment from the world in conjunction with compassion toward it.
To comment, as to the particular mythos of the Buddha just quoted, it should be held in mind that all mythoi are known to us via mixture of oral tradition over generations (in which the mythos told can undergo a good deal of plasticity and change) and writings which were not the subject's (in this case the Buddha's) own. The authenticity of the mythos is hence authored more by the characters and dispositions of those who told it than it is by the original Buddha himself. I much prefer the current Dalai Lama's underlying tenet that Buddhism is a faith grounded in reason. This over a potentially unquestioning acceptance of what mythoi have to say (which, after all, often diverge and conflict when taken as a whole in regard to a particular subject). In keeping with this, one can find the Dalai Lama's thoughts expressing that "a biased mind (which fully equates to a lack of psychological objectivity or else lack of psychological impartiality) cannot grasp reality" - which, to my best understanding, then equates detachment to an unbiased mind, hence to psychological objectivity/impartiality (not to be confused with physicality or else physical objects). This rather than lack of any outlook - outlooks which, as your examples illustrate, the Buddha indeed had - or else lack of being moved by the sorrows or joys of others.
I'm not disagreeing on the benefits of mindful, compassion-infused detachment (else unbiased-ness), but do want to question the attributes of it which were previously mentioned in your post, maybe in haste (?).
That said, I find myself having a great affinity toward the view that a Buddhist's calling is not personal salvation from suffering - this with unconcern for others' well-being such that one is not moved by their sorrows/suffering or joys/happiness - so much as the liberation of all.
Aren't exploration of those sorts of questions fundamental to philosophy proper? I know the analytical-plain language types don't think so, but then, they didn't feature in the original post.
That passage from the Dalai Lama makes the same point! Not a matter of like and dislike, for and against. It's significant that he was talking at an Interfaith Dialogue.
Same point as?
The point about the importance of detachment. The context is:
[quote=H H The Dalai Lama]I always say that every person on this earth has the freedom to practice or not practice religion. It is all right to do either. But once you accept religion, it is extremely important to be able to focus your mind on it and sincerely practice the teachings in your daily life. All of us can see that we tend to indulge in religious favouritism by saying, "I belong to this or that religion", rather than making effort to control our agitated minds. This misuse of religion, due to our disturbed minds, also sometimes creates problems.
I know a physicist from Chile who told me that it is not appropriate for a scientist to be biased towards science because of his love and passion for it. I am a Buddhist practitioner and have a lot of faith and respect in the teachings of the Buddha. However, if I mix up my love for and attachment to Buddhism, then my mind shall be biased towards it. A biased mind, which never sees the complete picture, cannot grasp the reality. And any action that results from such a state of mind will not be in tune with reality. As such it causes a lot of problems.
According to Buddhist philosophy, happiness is the result of an enlightened mind whereas suffering is caused by a distorted mind. This is very important. A distorted mind, in contrast to an enlightened mind, is one that is not in tune with reality.[/quote]
Isn't he saying here that 'attachment' is what introduces 'bias'? That it prevents seeing 'what is', because it skews judgement? That is very much what I was driving at.
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One general point I've been mulling over is when philosophers speaks portentiously of 'reality' or 'the nature of reality'. I feel the better expression is that philosophy considers the nature of being. 'Reality', after all, is based on the latin root 'res-' meaning 'thing'. And I believe that is the province of the objective sciences. Whereas 'being' is, in a way, a less specific term, as it pertains to human beings, and sentient beings generally //as well as the question of the meaning of 'being'//. I don't intend to devote any time to discussing Heidegger, but I recognise that his concern with the meaning of being and the unconcealment of being is near to what I mean.
I don't believe there is any "philosophy proper"philosophy is a multifarious thing. We have the diverse field of traditional metaphysics, we have post-Kantian metaphysics and critical philosophy, analytic philosophy, phenomenology, Pomo and so on.
I think Kant put paid to the idea that metaphysical truth in the traditional sense is attainable. Metaphysical questions as traditionally understood are undecidable, because there are no answers for which cogent evidence can be marshaled, and because there are no answers which are logically self-evident. So, answers to metaphysical questions are down to personal conviction, to one's own assessment of what seems most plausible or parsimonious.
I have no problem with speculative philosophy in the creative sense that it may present us with novel ways of thinking about things. Nothing wrong with exploring the imaginable possibilities, but I think intellectual honesty demands that we acknowledge that the truth of such speculations cannot be known.
It's really down to Kant's "limits of knowledge", that Wittgenstein also echoed. Some would say that even Kant transgressed his own principles in claiming to know things which the logic of his own system, if followed consistently, denies the possibility of knowing.
"Attachment" is not expressed in the passage, but "biased toward" is. To reiterate what I previously expressed, I'm all for the ideal of a mindful (as in "mindfulness"), compassion-infused detachment (aka lack of bias toward). Yet, again, when one loves, one is necessarily attached - and compassion devoid of all forms of love is ... not compassion.
Yes, under the philosophical microscope, love too is a bias. One that can be quite egotistically limited to specific others (my child, or parent, or lover only, and fu*k the rest) or else which can extent to humanity, the world in this sense, at large. And, often enough, one can hold varying extents of both forms simultaneously. But I gravely doubt that the Dalai Lama is claiming that such love-resulting favoring of those which one loves is a vice.
It is a complex topic. Charles Manson, given as an example of extreme vice, did undergo far more childhood abuse than many of us want to comprehend. There can then be compassion for him as an adult in this. But, notwithstanding, though this would preclude any feeling of glee in his suffering while incarcerated, it would not equate to either a) not wanting him incarcerated or else b) feeling compassion for him in the vice filled deeds, murdering, which he orchestrated. Here there is attachment, bias, to the ideal of equitable justice for all, for example. Something which all religions I can currently think of uphold in their theorizing (though not in uniform practice, lets say). An "attachment/bias" which I likewise gravely doubt the Dalai Lama would in any way denounce.
What being unbiased signifies is not being devoid of favoring equitable justice for all, but in keeping true to this by not favoring one individual other others when the same deed is done. For example, not excusing the billionaire when they double park on account of his status when holding average joe shmoe accountable for the same deed.
On a less mundane level, I'll uphold that the Dalai Lama, as with the original Buddha, is extremely attached/biased toward what some in the West term the Good. And that, in so being, he then becomes detached from / unbaiased in relation to all direct and inderect forms of nepotism, etc.
Again, its what "detachment" / "attachment" is being proposed to ideally be that I'm currently questioning - and not the favorably of detachment/attachment in general when understood to necessarily entail compassion (something that we so far seem to see eye to eye on).
He did so by re-defining its scope, not declaring it otiose, in the way that positivism did. Remember one of his key works is Prolegomena to any future metaphysics, so he clearly believed there could be such a subject.
Quoting Janus
As has already been pointed out:
Quoting Leontiskos
I'll also add something I've learned from John Vervaeke's lectures, about the different kinds of knowing:
I think that is the domain that you're referring to, as defining the entire scope of knowledge, and anything beyond that being 'speculative'. But it goes on:
source
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Quoting javra
An important point. Whilst Buddhist philosophy is rational, it has also been recognised from the outset that there are also states of being beyond the scope of reason.
[quote=The Brahmajala Sutta]These are those dhammas, bhikkhus, that are deep, difficult to see, difficult to understand, peaceful and sublime, beyond the sphere of reasoning, subtle, comprehensible only to the wise, which the Tath?gata, having realized for himself with direct knowledge, propounds to others; and it is concerning these that those who would rightly praise the Tath?gata in accordance with reality would speak.[/quote]
It's important to distinguish what is beyond reason from the merely irrational, which is not an easy distinction to grasp. But then, I think that is also understood in the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, in that he believes that there genuinely 'revealed truths'.
Of course. The very occurrence of being (else Being with a capital "B") is arational. Just about the only exception to the law of sufficient reason. And the occurrence of being is experienced, of itself experience, not something rationally derived or alternatively inferred.
Ah. Interesting. I recall the folk wisdom often quoted at wedding ceremonies, about the different kinds of love - eros, philia, agap?, storge and so on (there's eight). I think in English all of these tend to be congealed together under the heading of romantic attachment. Whereas the Buddhist 'karuna' or 'mudita' is perhaps closer to the Christian agap?, which 'pays no regard to persons'.
Quoting javra
Then I don't know if that is seeing the point! This is something often grappled with by Zen Buddhist aspirants - on the one hand, they are constantly urged to make a supreme effort, and the effort demanded of Zen students is arduous in the extreme. But at the same time, they're told that any effort arising from wanting some result or getting somewhere is mere egotism! The theory is that renunciation includes complete detachment from oneself, from trying to be or to get. That is the 'gordian knot' of life in a nutshell, and the reason that Zen Buddhism in particular is well-known for being a highly-focussed discipline. Krishnamurti would often say 'It is the truth that liberates you, not the effort to be free'. Not that this is in the least easy to understand or to fathom, because it's definitely not, to my mind.
My honest hunch is that Zen Buddhism is somehow often misconstrued, even among certain self proclaimed Zen Buddhism teachers/masters/experts which further the misconstrued. I've of course no facts to this effect, but it's certainly not beyond the realm of possibilities.
"It is the truth that liberates you, not the effort to be free" could be interpreted in myriad ways, some of which might be on track. But embedded right into this is the implicit and quite stringent affirmation that "liberation is good". Hence, the attachment/bias/favoring of that which is good - here, namely liberation from illusion - by any Zen Buddhist, and this irrespective of what is said, and the disfavoring of remaining "un-liberated" from, or enslaved to, illusion.
I neglected this part, Can you unpack what an agape that pays no regard to persons signifies to you?
Agape, commonly understood as "selfless brotherly love", that is not oriented at any person(s)?
Oh, no doubt. I'm one of that generation that used to sit around reading Alan Watts and D T Suzuki and believing that you could just 'get it'. But I realised quite early on that the reality is very different to that, the actual life of Zen monks is like being in the Army (even tougher, in lots of ways. There's no leave.)
But I'm also sure the orientation to the Good, or the 'will to truth', is not a matter of preference, of like or dislike. I think it manifests rather as a moral imperative, as an implicit awareness of something that must be heeded. Bringing the will in accordance with it is the supreme challenge for any of the perennial philosophies.
There is a saying I've heard from time to time 'the good which has no opposite'. The point being, what we think of as good is usually defined in opposition to what is not - pleasure as distinct from pain, health as distinct from illness, wealth as distinct from poverty. That is naturally what is subject to like and dislike. Whereas, for example, the Good (to agathon) in Greek philosophy, is not one pole in a duality but the ground of Being itself. Plotinus One, for instance, is purely Goodnot because it is opposed to evil but because it precedes the level of reality where such oppositions arise. (Hence also 'evil as privation of the Good'.) But again, the challenge is to be able to see (or be) that, not to form a concept about it. (Hence the 'participatory knowing' aspect. And again, not at all easy to fathom, not in the least.)
Quoting javra
Matt. 5:45 'He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good'. Doesn't that underwrite the Christian attitude of brotherly love, charity to the dispossessed and despised?
This is good. I would amend it slightly to say that "love" in English also tends to be construed as family love (storge), not just eros. The "impersonality" of agap? can perhaps best be seen as the crucial step in the widening of the circle of compassion/connection. Romantic love for an individual, family love for your kin, loyalty to your tribe/community/nation -- these are increasingly more general, until finally we arrive at agap?, which loves without condition. I also very much value a further extension -- did the Greeks have a word for it? -- that would refer to love of Creation itself, and all the beings, not just humans.
Ah. OK. I see things differently here. There's the "good" of not suffering, which I take all to consciously or unconsciously be oriented toward without exception (this as you here say, and as typical Buddhism upholds), but then there is also the Good as ultimate, existentially fixed telos. Skipping the rational to this, which is not readily expressible in soundbite form, I then find that many are, consciously or not, quite adverse to the Good: holding fear for it rather than love/affinity toward it. When a person indulges in the tyrannical pleasures of raping another, this, as one example, is not done with a "will to truth".
But I'll for my part leave this disagreement of opinion as is.
Quoting Wayfarer
The passage could be interpreted in various ways. I still don't understand by it what you interpret as an agape that pays no regard to persons.
Since what was addressed were aspects of the Abrahamic ethos, loving thy enemy (holding agape / compassion for one's enemy) is yet, to me, relative to person(s).
Didn't that come about to some extent with the Bible? God seeing the world as 'good'? I believe Plotinus expressed a similar idea - his main opposition to the Gnostics was that they despised the world.
Quoting javra
There's a Biblical text, 'God is no respecter of persons' (here am I quoting the Bible twice. I'm honestly not trying to evangalise Christianity in particular, but to draw out a point.) I think it's a very difficult saying in today's culture in which the individual is central. But the meaning of 'person' is derived from 'persona' which were the masks worn by the dramatis personnae in Greek drama. Wouldn't that be approximately equal to what we mean by ego, the self's idea of itself? But there are other levels of being or consciousness than the egoic consciousness. That is what I believe those kinds of sayings in the Bible are indicating. Another saying being 'He who saves his life will lose it' which I interpret to mean 'acting out of self-interest'. So, the principle is that agap? operates on a level other than that of the ego-persona and in that sense is impersonal - which again is supposed to be represented in the Christian ethos of 'loving the enemy'. (I think all of this is reasonably orthodox from a Christian point of view.)
Procedural knowledge is not a matter of truth but of skill. Of course, that said whether or not someone possesses a skill is demonstrable if the ability in question is observable. In other words, whether one can ride a bike or perform open heart surgery is testable, but whether or not one knows the truth about the nature of reality is not. In fact, even whether or not one is in an altered state of consciousness is not definitively testablebecause it relies on testimony, and it could be faked.
Perspectival knowledge is just knowing what logically follows from whatever presupposition are in play. If we assume that God created the world and that it is all good, all knowing and all powerful then...If there is no God and all of reality is just material, then...And so on...
Participatory knowledge is just knowing what this or that involvement or activity feels like. We cannot know what things feels like for others beyond what we can glean form their behavior and testimony. To say we know always presupposes self-knowledge and honesty on the part of those reporting their experience. The possibility of faking or self-delusion is always there. I can know what things feel like for me, of course, but that cannot really be rigorous intersubjective knowledge.
One of the points I've made to you more than a few times is the case of Osho. As I've said I've employed several sannyasins and also been friends with a few others, and acquainted with some through other friends. They make all the same arguments about Osho being enlightened as you would about the Buddha, the difference being that they actually knew the man himself. And yet you think he was a phony despite (I assume, perhaps incorrectly) never having met him.
So, all you have to go by are your own intuitions. What leads you to assume that your intuitions are better than the equally intelligent people I have met who were convinced he was the real thing? I predict you won't attempt to answer that question, and I think it is because you don't want to admit I am right. Your inability to answer that shows that personal intuitions are not intersubjectively testable knowledge of any kind, even though we might say they are perspectival and participatory (subjective) knowledge
Nothing whatever. I present ideas and texts, and then discuss them. If they irritate you, which they apparently do, then by all means don't participate.
What irritates me is that you present your beliefs as if they are Truth, I make what I honestly believe are valid objections to your apparent belief that you can know what you apparently think you do, that it is something more than just your personal conviction, and then instead of attempting to address those telling objections you deflect, simply ignore them or pretend that you have already answered them when you most obviously have not. If you presented your beliefs and just said "this is what I believe although I realize it may well not be true" then I would have no reason to complain.
You simply ignored all the points I made about the different kinds of knowledge, points which were in response to your attempt to paint me as reductively refusing to recognize more than one kind of knowledge. If you disagreed with what I said and had valid reason for disagreement then charitability would have dictated that you should address the points I took the trouble to make, and if you realized that I was right in what I wrote then intellectual honesty should have dictated that you admit as much.
And note, I have not been addressing you because you said you were going to ignore me. In this instance, it is you who responded to something I wrote which was addressed to someone else.
Certainly you can find that in the Bible, but in general Christianity has tended to stop at "loving humans" and not considered what it might mean to actually love animals -- or the environment in general, as we are now seeing, to our dismay. Or maybe we should say: Far too much traditional Christian doctrine places humankind at the pinnacle of creation -- made in God's image, dontcha know -- and sees nothing inconsistent with preaching agap? while at the same time claiming the right to use other animals for our own purposes, no matter the pain this may cause. This is a terrible failing. And I speak as a Christian.
You're limiting valid knowledge claims to the propostional, even while denying it!
Two of the three points you make are in the form of 'this type of knowledge is just... - if that is not reductionist, then what is it? You are literally explaining them away. So, what's to discuss?
It is my conviction that there is a vertical axis of quality, along which philosophical insight can be calibrated. It is distinct from the horizontal plane of scientific rationalism. That is 'where the conflict really lies'.
Quoting J
I suppose. But I went to a seminar once, where there was a discussion of whether traditional Buddhism had any kind of environmental awareness in the modern sense of respect for the environment. The view was pretty much, no, it is not something that Buddhism ever really thought about, in the pre-industrial age. And in defense of Christian social values, surely the idea that humans should be custodians of the environmental order can't be bad one.
I'm limiting valid knowledge claims to claims that can be rigorously tested. If someone says that rebirth is a fact, or Karma is real, or the existence of God is a fact, or the Buddha was enlightened...these are not valid knowledge claims, they are articles of personal belief.
Also, If I've said, "this type of knowledge is just...", and you disagree then the proper response would be to make an argument that shows that this type of knowledge is not just whatever. There is no point saying I'm being reductive without counterargument to what I've said. Also, I'm not explaining them awayI think those different kinds of knowledge are really validly distinguishable different kinds of subjective know-how and/ or experience.
Quoting Wayfarer
You are entitled to that conviction, and I'm entitled to lack it, and I've never said otherwise. It is an impossible conviction to argue for, though, or at least I've never seen an argument for it, from you or anyone else, that would convince the unbiased.
Quoting Wayfarer
It wasn't thought about because the science had not yet been developed. Also, the shit was not about to hit the fan as it is now.
Thats what I mean by subjectivising - that you regard such claims as possibly noble, but basically subjective. Whereas I dont think they are *either* claims of fact, *or* articles of personal belief. Its too narrow a criterion for questions of this kind.
Quoting Janus
Do you believe yourself to be someone without bias?
I've pointed to the psychics that the FBI uses any number of times now.
Quoting Janus
Sure they are. I've already shown that. You just keep asserting the contrary. Again:
Quoting Leontiskos
Imagine yourself in the ancient world with your thesis, "Okay, so you can reliably predict eclipses, and no one else can do this. But that doesn't mean you have special knowledge of nature." Of course it does! You are drawing up some fiction where someone is supposed to have a special ability which is in no way verifiable. What is an example of that? As far as I can tell, if a putative ability is in no way verifiable, then it isn't an ability at all. It certainly isn't an ability to do anything.
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Quoting Wayfarer
I think this is sort of the mirror error of @Janus'. These other forms of knowledge are not unverifiable or unconfirmable. If someone says that they have a special form of knowledge but there is no way for anyone else to confirm that they have a special form of knowledge, then they are probably flubbing. This applies to all knowledge, including procedural et al.
So perhaps you have consistently proposed forms of knowledge that are unverifiable, and Janus has been led to believe that such a thing makes sense. Or rather, in reaction to this sort of claim Janus goes to the other extreme and claims that anyone who claims to have special knowledge or special abilities can by definition provide no way for others to verify those abilities.
This is entirely wrong, and counterexamples abound. To take a single example, why does God give Moses the ability to turn his hand leprous and turn his walking staff into a snake? Because Moses knows that no one will believe that he has been sent by God if he can provide no evidence for that claim. These abilities are a direct response to Moses' claim:
Our culture is really, really averse to signs, and there are all sorts of complicated reasons for that. But the basic logic nevertheless holds: abilities produce acts (or as Aristotle says, the power is known through the act). To claim an ability without any accompanying act is to admit that there is no ability. To claim knowledge without being able to demonstrate the proper effect of that knowledge is to admit that there is no knowledge.
I have no idea whether that is well-documented or not.
Quoting Leontiskos
I have already told you I am not concerned about claims that could be verified by observation. I'm talking about claims like 'the Buddha was enlightened, whereas Osho was not' or 'god exists' or 'the soul is reincarnated' or ' there is a spiritual realm that we all go to when we die' and so on.
I don't know why you keep addressing what I've already told you is not my target.
Quoting Wayfarer
If claims are not intersubjectively verifiable and yet not "articles of subjective belief" then what are they? You are not actually saying anything that I could either agree or disagree with.
I would have thought, with your interests, that you would recognise that there are domains of discourse within which specialised forms of philosophical knowledge were recognised. I have noted, for example, in some of your exchanges with Count Timothy, a specialised degree of knowledge of the philosophy of Aquinas. I, of course, cannot judge the veracity of your knowledge, not possessing that knowledge myself, but Im sure you would agree that there would be some who could. And the same applies to other domains of discourse, which may exist in various cultural forms, and within which what is nowadays called inter-subjective validation might be available, even if not conforming to the standards of modern empirical science.
It's a very good one. But we'd have to say that either 1) institutional Christianity has paid little attention to it, or 2) institutional Christianity regards the wholesale slaughter and torture of billions of animals annually, along with the destruction of our planet's resources, as exemplifying being "custodians of the environmental order." That is taking Newspeak way too far, in my opinion.
In fairness, there are Christians, and Christian communities, who take seriously the idea of stewardship of the environment, but they are a small minority, and even they usually draw the line at saying that we don't have a God-given right to use animals for our own purposes.
Note, I said 'subjectivizing'. That is different to 'inter-subjective validation'. What you are saying is that what I'm tagging 'higher knowledge' can only be subjective or personal, as it can't be objectively measured or validated:
Quoting Janus
I guess by 'rigorously tested' you mean subjected to empirical testing. This is what I mean when I said you are appealing to positivism, as it is what positivism says.
But notice that I have nowhere in this thread mentioned those as facts. What I've referred to are some specific Buddhist texts (among others) on the meaning of detachment. But the terms 'karma', 'rebirth' were introduced to the discussion by you, and 'God' in the context of the writings of Meister Eckhardt (who was a Christian theologian).
I've only just now noticed your questions from the other day and I will try to address them.
Quoting Janus
I agree that in one sense, it can only be known 'each one by him or herself'. But in the long history of philosophy and spirituality there are contexts within which such insights may be intersubjectively validated. That is the meaning of the lineages within such movements.
But there's also a very real element of that in the classical philosophical tradition Figures such as Parmenides were believed to possess insights that were not obtainable to the great mass of people. Studying philosophy was believed to be a way to understand those insights. That was the point!
Quoting Janus
With difficulty! Delusion and mistakes are definitely hazards and there are many examples, which fake gurus are quick to exploit.
Quoting Janus
Metacognitive insight - insight into the mind's own workings and operations. After all one of the foundational texts of Western philosophy is about Socrates' 'know thyself' and he was keenly aware of the possibility of self delusion. A lot of his dialogues were focussed on revealing the self-delusions of those to whom he spoke.
Quoting Janus
It's not unique to me. And I'm not condemning modernity. What I've said that is objectivity has a shadow. There is something that exclusive reliance on objective science neglects or forgets. And I'm far from the only person who says this. You probably have read more Heidegger than have I, but this is a theme in his writing also, is it not?
Really recommend John Vervaeke's lectures in Awakening from the Meaning Crisis on all this.
(Spirituality and Philosophy in Kants Critique of Pure Reason, pg. 8)
Sure, just about any text can be interpreted to suit the reader .
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..even if almost always at the expense of the author:
.. This substance, merely as an object of the internal sense, gives the conception of Immateriality; as simple substance, that of Incorruptibility; its identity, as intellectual substance, gives the conception of Personality; all these three together, Spirituality. Its relation to objects in space gives us the conception of connection (commercium) with bodies. Thus it represents thinking substance as the principle of life in matter, that is, as a soul (anima), and as the ground of Animality; and this, limited and determined by the conception of spirituality, gives us that of Immortality.
Now to these conceptions relate four paralogisms of a transcendental psychology, which is falsely held to be a science of pure reason, touching the nature of our thinking being. We can, however, lay at the foundation of this science nothing but the simple and in itself perfectly contentless representation I which cannot even be called a conception, but merely a consciousness which accompanies all conceptions .
(A345/B403, in Kemp Smith, 1929)
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Because of this .
. Criticism alone can strike a blow at the root of materialism, fatalism, atheism, free-thinking, fanaticism, and superstition, which are universally injuriousas well as of idealism and scepticism, which are dangerous to the schools, but can scarcely pass over to the public.
(Ibid Bxxxv)
.in which spirituality, being conspicuously absent hence apparently not universally injurious, seemingly warrants it as not only provisionally and experimentally discoverable somewhere in the text, but possibly useful, in direct opposition to the authors declaration of the souls nature as .purely negative and does not add anything to our knowledge, and the only inferences to be drawn from it are purely fictitious (A799/B827, in Miekeljohn, ca1852)
That's right. It's like aesthetic quality in that sense. We experience the beauty and profundity of works, but we have no way of confirming that those are objective qualities.
Quoting Wayfarer
Empirical testing is definitive only in cases of observational propositions, not in the case of scientific hypotheses. The fact that the predictions that are made on the basis of an hypothesis can be observed to obtain does not prove the hypothesis to be true. So, the 'verification' principles of positivism I don't hold.
Quoting Wayfarer
The problem is that if someone says that rebirth or afterlife or God is real, then they are claiming that they are facts. If you want to say such things and yet also say that they are not facts, then what would you be saying? It seems to me you would be saying nothing cogent, or else you would be contradicting yourself. If you merely want to say that those things are believed, then if true (and we obviously know it is true) it would be a fact that they are believedbut what would be the point since we already know that.
Quoting Wayfarer
As I've said many times, I have no issue with ideas like detachment or Stoic acceptanceI think they are commonsense principles for the attainment of peace of mind. My whole argument is just that the so-called enlightened do not know anything demonstrably true about the nature of reality or the meaning of life. The teachings are only valuable insofar as they may help people gain peace of mind. If you need to believe in God to gain peace of mind there's nothing wrong with that. But trying to prove that God exists to others is futile, and also, I don't think it's a good way to attain peace of mind.
I don't deny the reality of so-called 'spiritual experiences'the experiences are real, but the conclusions people draw on account of those experiences are subjective. I think it's important to get that clear, or else the door to fundamentalism and ideology and abuse swings wide open.
Quoting Wayfarer
It's like how people within art or literary or musical movements intersubjectively validate their mutual aesthetic judgements. It only works if you're already converted, so to speak. There can be definitive intersubjective validation of the kind that would convince the unbiased.
Quoting Wayfarer
Sure, but you have no definitive way of determining who is fake and who is not. Otherwise, intelligent, even highly intelligent, individuals could not be deceived, as they apparently very often are.
Quoting Wayfarer
Introspection is notoriously unreliable. Also, I was talking about the nature of reality in the universal sense, not just of the human condition. Socrates claimed to know nothing other than that he knew nothing. The Socratic dialogues seem to be mostly concerned with showing people, via critical examination, that they do not know what they think they do about things like justice, virtue, the good and so on. I'm attempting to do a similar thing here.
Quoting Wayfarer
I think it's obvious that we cannot rely on science when it comes to aesthetic and ethical judgements. Humans understand one another in terms of reasons, not in terms of causation, so science is of little use in our everyday attempts to understand one another. Heidegger counts science ( 'present at hand' enquiry) to be secondary to and derivative of lived experience, and I think that is true. But he cautioned against 'ontotheology' which I understand to consist in the absolutization of the human undertsnding of being. I think it is what you get when you say that because nothing is experienced and judged without the mind, that therefore nothing exists without the mind. I think this confuses knowledge and understanding with being.
I have watched about 30 episodes of Vervaeke' lectures, and I found them quite interesting. I didn't find much there to disagree with if I remember rightly (I watched them over a year ago now).
[i]Calculative thinking computes. It computes ever new, ever more promising and at the same time more economical possibilities. Calculative thinking races from one prospect to the next. Calculative thinking never stops, never collects itself. Calculative thinking is not meditative thinking, not thinking which contemplates the meaning which reigns in everything that is. There are, then, two kinds of thinking, each justified and needed in its own way: calculative thinking and meditative thinking
Yet anyone can follow the path of meditative thinking in his own manner and within his own limits. Why? Because man is a thinking, that is, a meditating being. Thus meditative thinking need by no means be "high-flown." It is enough if we dwell on what lies close and meditate on what is closest; upon that which concerns us, each one of us, here and now; here, on this patch of home ground; now, in the present hour of history
For the way to what is near is always the longest and thus the hardest for us humans. This way is the way of meditative thinking. Meditative thinking demands of us not to cling one-sidedly to a single idea, nor to run down a one-track course of ideas. Meditative[/i] thinking demands of us that we engage ourselves with what at first sight does not go to-gether at all (Discourse on Thinking 1959).
not as I understand it - ontotheology was the concentration on beings instead of Being, but writ large as the supreme being
Quoting Janus
But you are not Socrates ;-)
You are wrong about that...look it up.
Quoting Wayfarer
Judging from Plato's reports of Socrates, I'm just as capable as he was as he was of critical thought It's a pity the same cannot be said of you.
You're a hopeless interlocutor. I make an effort to answer your questions and all you care to address are the trivial points you can carp over. I hope you go back to ignoring me now.
This esteemed rabbi was on his death bed. Many of his former students and admirers filed in to pay their respects and sing his praises - his learning, his mastery of the Torah and so forth. After they left, his wife said to him, why do you look so downcast, Moshe? They all said such nice things about you.
My humility, he said morosely. Nobody mentioned my humility.
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Apparently 's knowledge of historical Christianity is as superficial as his knowledge of historical philosophy. This looks like the same trite political ideology pretending to reprimand Christianity.
Right, which is to say that something can be verifiable even if it is not verifiable according to some particular metric. For example, a Buddhist claim can be verified, but not with a microscope.
Scientism is the idea that the only meaningful forms of verification are those of the (hard) sciences, and it is widely recognized to be not only wrong, but incoherent. I think we agree on this. I'm not sure where @Janus fits into this.
Quoting Leontiskos
Quoting Leontiskos
We might agreewhat kind of Buddhist claims do you have in mind? For example, do you think the Buddhist claim that Gautama was supremely enlightened can be verified?
Quoting Janus
Does that bolded sentence contain a typo?
If a Buddhist says that her claims are verifiable, and the skeptic remarks that they are not verifiable with a microscope, the Buddhist would reasonably respond, "I was not claiming that they are verifiable with a microscope. You are talking past me." If we correctly situate the claim then it seems to me that this problem of "objectivity" never arises. If the Buddhist says that her claims are verifiable with a microscope, then it would be appropriate to oppose the idea that her claims are verifiable with a microscope. If she isn't saying that, then it isn't appropriate.
Quoting Janus
I think someone could achieve the same level of proficiency as Gautama, and at that point they would be positioned to vet such a claim. A person in that position would be capable of verifying or falsifying such a claim. The same thing could be done to a lesser extent by someone who has not achieved that state, but has learned to recognize proficiency or hierarchy in that realm. These are all forms of verification, are they not?
Yes, thanks for pointing that outthe "can" should have been a "cannot".
I haven't addressed anything as silly as verufying Buddhist claims with a microscope. so that seems like a red herring to me.
Quoting Leontiskos
So, you are saying that if I became supremely enlightened, I would know whether the Buddha was supremely enlightened? Can the claim that it is possible to become supremely enlightened be verified in the first place? If I thought I was supremely enlightened, allowing for the sake of argument that I could know such a thing, how could I know the same thing about someone I had never met? And even if I had met him or her, how could I know? And further even if I could know, how could I demonstrate that knowledge to someone else? And all that aside, how could I rule out self-deception in my own case?
I believe that altered states of consciousness, epiphanies and what are called religious experiences are certainly possible, they do sometimes, under certain conditions, happen. I know this from personal experience. But I cannot demonstrate even that possibility to anyone who has not experience an altered state themselves, and then I don't need to demonstrate anythingmy experience is irrelevant to them. It is their own experience that might lead them to belive.
That said, I just don't believe that such experiences yield any determinate knowledge, other than that such experiences may happen. The rest is interpretation after the fact, and usually culturally mediated. That is if people interpret such experience religiously, then they will usually do so in terms of the religion they are familiar with. Of course, such experiences may yield a profound sense of knowing, but that is a different thing and although they might serve to determine my own personal beliefs, they cannot serve to justify anyone else's. They would need to have their own experience.
Hence my frequent referral to 'domains of discourse'. By that I mean, specific cultural rubrics. I've looked into the origin of that term, and originally it was derived from mathematics, but I'm using it in the sense that different cultures and sub-cultures exist within a rubric of meanings and implicit understandings, and that it's necessary to understand something of that background in order to interpret them.
Buddhism is an example, as it developed, up until quite late, in a completely separate cultural sphere from the Christian West. For many of the key terms of Buddhism such as karma, Nirv??a, sa?s?ra, and dharma, there are no direct equivalents in English or indeed in the Christian cultural framework. So understanding it in its own terms requires some assimilation of its terminology and the cultural and spiritual setting within which they're meaningful.
Case in point: the term 'enlightenment' itself which seems to pivotal to the entire culture. It was used to translated the Pali/Sanskrit term 'bodhi' by T W Rhys Davids, a British translator and founder of the Pali Text Society, formed in what was then Ceylon in 1881. 'Bodhi' is a noun derived from the root 'budh-' meaning awakening or enlightenmentspecifically, the insight into the true nature of reality in Buddhist thought. It's the same root word used to form 'Buddha.'
Rhys Davids chose the term 'enlightenment' at least in part because of its resonances with how the term had been used in European culture in respect of the European Enlightenment. Rhys-Davids (and his wife, who was also involved in the Society) presented Pali Buddhism as being compatible with science in a way that Christianity was not (although they both disparaged Mah?y?na Buddhism as having been corrupted by superstition.) But I think one consequence of this is that the European and Buddhist uses of 'enlightenment' are in many ways incommensurable, resulting in confusion as to what it actually means. Buddhism was often said by its early 20th century exponents to be a 'scientific religion' with the principle of karma being compared to Newton's laws of action and reaction. But I think that was fanciful. (One of the reasons Evan Thompson gives for not being Buddhist in his book on that, is the persistent myth of the 'scientific' nature of Buddhism.)
So, after that rather long digression, how can Buddhist claims be verified? One could easily dismiss the whole story as myth, and many do. But I think the preponderance of archeological and archival evidence indicates that he was a real historical figure. So as to whether the Buddha was enlighented, that amounts to asking whether the Buddha was really a Buddha ('Buddha' being a term for a class of beings.) So if one accepts that such a teacher actually existed, asking whether he is enlightened is rather like asking whether a standard meter is, in fact, a meter long. But that is not, as you say, something to be validated by scientific instrumentation.
As to whether Buddhist principles can be verified by anyone other than a Buddha, it might be pointed out that the Buddhist sangha (monastic associations) are the oldest continually-existing religious orders in the world today. Again, some might believe that this is a long history of self-delusion but I don't think that credible.
None of which means that specious claims of enlightenment are not common.
Quoting Leontiskos
I will say that there many here who advocate a kind of articulate positivism and pragmatism, along common-sense lines. Positivism is a powerful influence in modern thought. The dictionary definition is 'Positivism - a philosophical system recognizing only that which can be scientifically verified or which is capable of logical or mathematical proof, and therefore rejecting metaphysics and theism'. It's the default for a lot of people. They will recognise the possibility of veridical religious experience, but insist that they are subjective and meaningful only to those who have them, and cannot be conveyed, nor form the basis of any real philosophy. Thereby vitiating the whole tradition of Buddhist philosophy, among others.
(Although, there is another terminological note: 'philosophy' is derived from the Greek term philo- love and sophia -wisdom, hence, love of wisdom or love~wisdom. It has been argued that Indian wisdom teachings are distinct from Greek philosophy proper, on those etymological grounds. The Hindu schools of what we call 'philosophy' are called 'darshana', derived from 'seeing' or 'seer'. Buddhism self-description of the Buddha's teaching is a 'sasana', meaning a 'dispensation'. But in any case, there are sound scholarly comparisons of the themes of Buddhist teachings presented as philosophy, notably by Mark Siderits. And of course the vast corpus of Buddhist philosophical commentaries, spanning millenia and cultures, in a diverse array of languages.)
Okay. :up:
Quoting Janus
Silly examples are helpful. So what is your "microscope"? Why do you say a Buddhist claim is unverifiable?
Quoting Janus
I am saying that if you achieve the same level of proficiency as Gautama, then you would be in a very good position to judge that level of proficiency.
Quoting Janus
Sorry, but this is gish gallop. You are just throwing as many random objections out onto the table as you can. If you have an argument it will need to be much more focused.
Quoting Janus
Okay, so what? Do you think someone is saying that experience-claims must be verifiable by all in order to be verifiable? That they must be verifiable even to those who do not possess microscopes? Because not even science works that way.
Quoting Janus
And do you think your claims here are verifiable?
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Quoting Wayfarer
Okay, but I think Christian claims are also verifiable. I did not mean to speak only about Buddhism. I just know that you and Janus like to talk about it.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, that seems accurate, namely that @Janus has some bone to pick with truth-claims which flow out of religious experience. Perhaps he thinks that when someone makes a claim based on a religious experience, that claim is unverifiable? But he himself asserts that such claims are false. Is his assertion verifiable? If it is not, then it probably doesnt count as a meaningful assertion. If it is, then the claim he is scrutinizing must also be verifiable (given that he is purporting to falsify it). So I dont think claims based on religious experience are unverifiable, even though they are more difficult to substantively verify or falsify.
(As a further issue, @Janus might say that an individual can make unverifiable assertions, such as, There is a teapot orbiting Jupiter. I would object by saying that if someone does not have grounds for an assertion, then they are not making an assertion. They can form an unverifiable proposition, but they cannot assert it without grounds. The fundamental point of inquiry for any assertion are the (subjective) grounds upon which it stands, and this is why <falsifiability and the principle of sufficient reason> go hand in hand. ...Incidentally, the pluralists on TPF have a tendency to trade in faux assertions, namely by pretending to assert something that they do not in fact assert an endless what if? game.)
Claims are verifiable by observational evidence or logic (self-evidence). I cannot see how Buddhist claims can be definitively verified, just as claims that one artwork is better than another cannot be definitively verified.
So, I ask how can the claimed supreme enlightenment of the Buddha, a claimed lack of enlightenemnet of Osho, be verified to an unbiased subject?
Quoting Leontiskos
No, they are just examples of the kinds of claim that I can see no possibility of verifiability for. I'm not presenting an argument but rather a question to those who believe that such claims are definitively verifiableI am asking for an argument, for the claim that they are verifiablean explanation for how they can be verified.
Quoting Leontiskos
Which claims do you have in mind? You need to be more specific, as I'm not sure I've made claims here, but am just laying out what I personally believe on the basis of personal experience, and what I don't believe on the basis of having a lack of reason to believe.
Quoting Leontiskos
That's bullshitI have not said that post hoc claims based on, or interpretations of, religious experiences, are falseI have merely claimed that they cannot be verified to be true. This discussion will proceed better if you don't misrepresent what I have said.
Quoting Leontiskos
If you think such claims are verifiable, whereas I don't believe they are simply because I cannot see how they could be, then the burden is on you to explain how they could verifiable. And bear in mind I am asking how they can be verifiable to the unbiased. I don't deny that the "choir" might agree with any kind of outlandish claims. For example, some Christians believe that Jesus caused Lazarus to return to life when he had been dead, that Jesus walked on water, and that Jesus himself "rose from the dead". How would you verify such claims? 'Verify' does not mean merely 'convince others'.
But, if I am understanding your objections properly, wouldn't this equally apply to knowing that anyone else is having [I]any[/I] experiences at all?
How do you "demonstrate" that someone else is experiencing red, enjoying a song, or in pain, for instance?
Presumably the same way we "verify" other historical claims. But if your problem is not the plausibility of particular Christian claims, but rather our capacity to verify these sorts of claims at all, it would seem that the problem of verification you identify here would apply equally to virtually all fact claims about historical events.
How does one "verify" that Hannibal won the Battle of Cannae through a double envelopment, for instance? Or that the Germans started World War II with a false flag attack? Or that St. Augustine was a Maniche in his youth? Or that St. Thomas' studied in Paris?
You can demonstrate that people see red by showing them something red and asking them what colour it is. We tend to think we can tell when someone is in pain or enjoying something by their behavior, by reading their facial expressions and body language for examplebut it is always possible they are faking.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
The more we can cross-reference documents that record the same events when or close to when they happened, the more reliable we would think the records arethe more likely we would be to believe the events happened. There is no way to go back and observe though.
When the recording documents are understood to be more distant in time from the described events then their reliability would reasonably be thought to be inversely proportional to the temporal distance. When the described events are extraordinary, things of which we have no well-documented examples, like walking on water, raising people from the dead or turning water into wine. then we would be justified in skepticism.
In general, we cannot be sure of any historical events because as I said above, we cannot go back in time to observe for ourselves.
[quote=Wikipedia;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verificationism]Verificationism, also known as the verification principle or the verifiability criterion of meaning, is a doctrine in philosophy which asserts that a statement is meaningful only if it is either empirically verifiable (can be confirmed through the senses) or a tautology (true by virtue of its own meaning or its own logical form). Verificationism rejects statements of metaphysics, theology, ethics and aesthetics as meaningless in conveying truth value or factual content, though they may be meaningful in influencing emotions or behavior.
Verificationism was a central thesis of logical positivism, a movement in analytic philosophy that emerged in the 1920s by philosophers who sought to unify philosophy and science under a common naturalistic theory of knowledge. The verifiability criterion underwent various revisions throughout the 1920s to 1950s. However, by the 1960s, it was deemed to be irreparably untenable. Its abandonment would eventually precipitate the collapse of the broader logical positivist movement.[/quote]
[quote=Wittgenstein, Tolstoy and the Folly of Logical Positivism, Stuart Greenstreet;https://philosophynow.org/issues/103/WittgensteinTolstoy_and_the_Folly_of_Logical_Positivism]To the question What is your aim in philosophy?, Wittgenstein replied, To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle. By this he meant that the work of philosophy consists essentially of elucidations (4.112). This provokes the further question Why then are the ideas of the Tractatus so obscure and controversial, as for instance in paragraph 6.522 quoted above, which says values make themselves manifest? A. C. Grayling, for instance, has complained:
If it were true that value somehow just manifested itself, it would be puzzling why conflicts and disagreements should arise over ethical questions, or why people can passionately and sincerely hold views which are quite opposite to those held with equal passion and sincerity by others.
Wittgenstein: A Very Short Introduction
On the contrary, I dont find the idea of different manifest values being held by different people at all puzzling. It is in the very nature or essence of values (as distinct from verifiable facts) that they are contentious. There is simply no objective truth to be had about a judgement of value. So it would be extremely odd if the values be they moral, aesthetic, religious, or whatever that manifest themselves to us as individuals were to be the same for everybody. In such a weird case they would cease to be values as we understand them.
The declared aim of the Vienna Circle was to make philosophy either subservient to, or somehow akin to, the natural sciences. As Ray Monk says in his superb biography Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (1990), the anti-metaphysical stance that united them [was] the basis for a kind of manifesto which was published under the title The Scientific View of the World: The Vienna Circle. Yet as Wittgenstein himself protested again and again in the Tractatus, the propositions of natural science have nothing to do with philosophy (6.53); Philosophy is not one of the natural sciences (4.111); It is not problems of natural science which have to be solved (6.4312); even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all (6.52); There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical (6.522). None of these sayings could possibly be interpreted as the views of a man who had renounced metaphysics. The Logical Positivists of the Vienna Circle had got Wittgenstein wrong, and in so doing had discredited themselves.[/quote]
My view has always been that Wittgenstein had no interest in metaphysics as traditionally conceived and practiced. He though it consisted in abuse of language. This short paper asserts, and I think rightly, that Wittgenstein practiced a kind of metaphysics, as we all do, where metaphysics is conceived as the most general attempt to make sense of things... of reality.
This general endeavor to make sense of things qualifies, according to the author and I agree, as metaphysics in the broadest sense of being 'beyond physics', outside its purview, but it eschews any claims about ultimate substances or foundations, gods, or anything transcendent or otherworldly.
You won't ind any claims such as that without minds the world would not exist in Wittgenstein.
The paper can be found here.
Since it is relatively short I reproduce it in full:
[b]Metaphysics is inescapable: Even Wittgenstein was a metaphysician (The Return of Metaphysics)
Reading | Metaphysics
Prof. Adrian William Moore, PhD | 2022-08-21[/b]
[i]In distancing himself from the Big Questions, such as the nature of reality and the meaning of life, Ludwig Wittgenstein ends up applying a generally-defined form of metaphysics as an antidote to unclear thinking. This essay by Prof. Moore is part of our The Return of Metaphysics series, produced in collaboration with the Institute of Art and Ideas (IAI). It was first published by the IAI on the 17th of August, 2022.
It is well known that Wittgensteins early and later philosophical works are marked by various profound differences of style and content. Nevertheless, there are some equally profound and very significant continuities. Among these are his conception of philosophy itself and, relatedly, an apparent recoil from metaphysics. Let us look at these in turn.
Wittgenstein conceives of philosophy as an activity, rather than a body of doctrine. Its aim is to promote clarity of thought and understanding, not to discover and state truths about the nature of reality. Moreover, this aim is to be viewed in therapeutic terms. Philosophy is an antidote to unclear thinking, and specifically to the ill effects of our mishandling our own ways of making sense of things. For an example of such ill effects, consider someone interested in the privacy of sensations who asks the following question, and who struggles to find any satisfactory answer: Why can nobody else know with the certainty I do whether I feel pain? On Wittgensteins view, if we attend to the way in which sentences like I feel pain are actually used, then this will appear akin to someone grappling with the gibberish: Why can nobody else know with the certainty I do whether ouch!? Philosophy can be used to show that there is no real problem here.
Or at least, this is true of good philosophy. Wittgenstein distinguishes between good philosophy, which is what we have just been talking about, and bad philosophy, which is the home of the very confusions against which good philosophy is pitted.
This brings us to the apparent recoil from metaphysics. For in both his earlier and his later work, the only clearly pertinent uses of the term metaphysical indicate that Wittgenstein identifies metaphysics with bad philosophy. What we do, he writes in Philosophical Investigations, is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use. That is, what we do, qua good philosophers, is to rescue words from their abuse in the hands of bad philosophers (who no doubt, very often, include us).
The kind of metaphysics to which Wittgenstein is opposed is concerned with what we might call the Big Questions. Is there a God? What is the fundamental nature of reality? Does it consist ultimately of substances, and, if so, what are they? What is the fundamental nature of the self? Can it survive physical death? Do we have free will? And suchlike. But on a Wittgensteinian conception, trying to tackle these Big Questions involves wrenching ordinary ways of making sense of things from their ordinary contexts and producing nonsense as a result. For instance, there is no such Big Question as whether we have free will: there are just the various particular local questions that we ask in our everyday transactions with one another, such as whether the chairman issued his written apology of his own free will or was coerced into doing it. And we do not need metaphysics to know how to answer such questions.
Why, then, do I talk of Wittgensteins apparent recoil from metaphysics? Given what I have said so far, surely there cannot be any doubt that he is firmly opposed to itcan there?
Well, to invoke that old philosophical cliché, it depends on what you mean by metaphysics. On some conceptions of metaphysics, including that which Wittgenstein would identify as bad philosophy, no: there cannot be any doubt that he is firmly opposed to it. However, there is a conception of metaphysics that I myself have found useful, and which I think covers much of what self-styled metaphysicians in the past have been up to: metaphysics is simply the most general attempt to make sense of things. This leaves entirely open what kinds of questions metaphysicians ask, or what kinds of methods they adopt. And it means that there is a serious question to be addressed about whether Wittgenstein himself, in his efforts to promote clarity of thought and understanding at a suitably high level of generality, counts as a practicing metaphysician.
For instance, let us reconsider the privacy of sensations. In Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein draws an analogy between such privacy and the solo nature of the game of patience. He is reminding us that it is integral to the very meaning of the word sensation that a sensation can never be said to be more than one persons. This is part of his attempt to achieve a clearer understanding of the nature of the mind. It is also, in its own distinctive way, a contribution to the most general attempt to make sense of things.
Moreover, there is nothing in Wittgensteins approach to philosophy to entail that the only way of practicing good philosophy is by nurturing or protecting the ordinary use of words, as opposed to introducing new purpose-specific legislation for their use. Thus consider one of the Big Questions that I flagged above: does reality consist ultimately of substances, and, if so, what are they? The great seventeenth-century thinkers Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz each believed that reality does consist ultimately of substances. But they disagreed about what they are. Descartes believed that reality consists of substances of three kinds: one Divine substance (God); one extended substance (matter); and many, maybe infinitely many, created thinking substances (minds). Spinoza believed that reality consists of only one substance (God), which is both extended and thinking. Leibniz believed that reality consists of infinitely many substances (God included), all of which are thinking but none of which is extended.
It is hard not to react to such disagreement with a degree of skepticism about what is even at issue. And indeed, in the following century Hume was prepared to deny that the word substance, as these philosophers had been using it, has any meaning. We might as well expect Wittgenstein to agree with Hume. (In his earlier work, Wittgenstein himself made significant use of the word substance; but he also famously conceded that what he had written was nonsense.) However, even if Wittgenstein does agree with Hume, he need not see the situation as irremediable. If a philosopher is able to explain with due clarity how they are using the word substance, and if they have some particular reason to use it in that way, so be it. When philosophy is asked What is substance?, Wittgenstein says, the request is for a rule which holds for the word substance. To provide such a rule is not to tackle one of the Big Questions; it is rather to put a well-defined question in its place. But on the broad conception of metaphysics that I have been advocating, it can also readily be seen as a methodological preliminary to engaging in the metaphysics of substance.
On that broad conception, then, not only can Wittgenstein be seen as friendly towards metaphysics; he can be seen as himself a practitioner.
But it goes deeper than that. Wittgensteins concern to combat bad philosophy with good philosophy is accompanied by a high degree of self-consciousness about the very nature of the exercise. He wants to understand what he is combating with what. This is because he is as interested in diagnosis as he is in cure. And this involves stepping back and asking, if not Big Questions, then at the very least some searching questions, about how we make sense of things.
To be sure, even when Wittgenstein is addressing these questions, he avoids the pitfalls of what, by his lights, counts as bad philosophy. A bad philosophical approach to these questions would involve subliming such notions as meaning, understanding, truth and reality, and trying to arrive at substantial theses about how such things are related. Wittgenstein is not interested in arriving at any substantial theses. In keeping with his conception of good philosophy, he wants to be clear about the various unambitious views concerning meaning, understanding, truth and reality that we already have. And he tries to do this through a creative use of hints, reminders and commonplaces.
But in his later workand here perhaps we see one of the most significant differences between his later and earlier workshe also wants to draw our attention to the contingencies that underlie how we make sense of things. He wants to dispel any impression that how we make sense of things is the way to make sense of them. Thus, he fastens on what he calls our forms of life, something that he in turn describes as what has to be accepted or as the given. He is referring to the basic biological realities, the customs and practices, the complex of animal and cultural sensibilities, which enable us to make shared sense of things in the ways in which we do. Were it not for these, we would make quite different sense of thingsif indeed we made sense of things at all.
Moreover, not only is Wittgenstein self-conscious about the contingency of our sense-making; he is also self-conscious about a problematical idealism that it seems to entail, where by idealism is meant the view that what we make sense of is dependent on how we make sense of it [Editors note: this is not the objective idealism promoted by Essentia Foundation, which does entail the existence of states of affairs that are not contingent on human cognition]. The worry is this: by drawing attention to the way in which facts about us help to determine how we make sense of things, Wittgenstein is making it look as thoughas he himself puts ithuman agreement decides what is true and what is false.
Now, in fact ,Wittgenstein manages to repress the idealism. He distinguishes between the claims that we make, whose truth or falsity does not depend on us, and the linguistic and conceptual resources that we use to make these claims, which do depend on us but whose dependence on us is harmless and does not betoken any kind of idealism. This is itself an example of his counteracting confusion and pitting good philosophy against bad philosophy.
But he is also undeniably probing some very large issues about how we stand in relation to reality. There seems to me to be ample evidence here to support my main contention: that when metaphysics is understood as the most general attempt to make sense of things, then what Wittgenstein is doing in much of his work, both when he is combating bad philosophy with good philosophy and when he is reflecting self-consciously on what this involves, is acting the metaphysician.[/i]
As I understand it also, but do notice the very last sentence of that essay. Saying that metaphysics is empty or meaningless, as positivism does, is itself a metaphysical claim - hence the saying 'no metaphysics is bad metaphysics'.
Even if we went back in time our eyes or senses could be deceiving us. Or we could just be misunderstanding the historical event.
IMO certain historical facts serve as linchpins and essentially place them practically beyond doubt without our historical knowledge of that period (and possibly later) falling apart. One example could be Caesar's existence. Even if a paper were to come out placing reasonable doubt on most or all the sources behind Caesar we couldn't seriously entertain the idea of Caesar's non-existence without unraveling so much of our historical knowledge of that period and beyond. So it could be said that we start with Caesar's existence (through our body of historical knowledge) and his existence is not so much a conclusion that e.g. we work up to inductively through gathering our sources and making an educated inference that he indeed existed.
Anscombe puts it better than me in her "Hume and Julius Caesar."
Right, but Wittgenstein would agree with the positivists that traditional metaphysics, is meaningless in the sense that it has no referent. From the Tractatus:
[i]4.003
Most propositions and questions, that have been written about
philosophical matters, are not false, but senseless. We can
not, therefore, answer questions of this kind at all, but only
state their senselessness. Most questions and propositions of
the philosophers result from the fact that we do not understand
the logic of our language.
(They are of the same kind as the question whether the Good
is more or less identical than the Beautiful.)
And so it is not to be wondered at that the deepest problems
are really no problems[/i]
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
If we had been there and saw a man, we knew to be Caesar crossing the Rubicon then we could be certain in the sense iof having no cogent reason to doubt that Caesar crossed the Rubicon. How certain of that can we be now? I don't know how well-documented it is...I am not an historian.
From the concluding sections of the same work, however, you find Wittgenstein's 'metaphysical aphorisms'
The True and the Beautiful, right? And it is true that a lot of blathering about metaphysics is meaningless, because it's undertaken by pundits who really can't 'walk the walk', they lack the insight into what it's about. In the hands of a master of the subject, they're far from meaningless.
I'll submit my post anyway.
Quoting Janus
Interesting. Which is of course on par to asking if the Good is as darkly green as is the Beautiful. In short, a blatant category error, which, outside of some possibly rather refined or specialized poetic meaning, makes no sense whatsoever.
Notwithstanding, implicit in this very assertion of, to paraphrase, the Goods quality of identity when looked at in comparison to that of the Beautifuls, is the rather blatant affirmation that both the Good and the Beautiful are to be considered metaphysical realities.
I personally do not know of any more a metaphysical concept than that of the Good per se, such that it supersedes all others. Which, despite being instantiated in all instances of goodness such that it is what gives goodness its meaning, is none of these instances individually. The Good by very definition cannot have any empirical identity, yet it is that which grounds all senses of goodness within the empirical world. Does one thereby take goodness to be a metaphysical claim devoid of any referent as term on grounds that the Good cannot be pointed to with a finger?
Is there any evidence that Wittgenstein did?
If not, he might have well been quite metaphysical in his personal beliefs.
-------
Again, something which 's latest post illustrates to me to have indeed been the case. :up:
We would need to trust our sources regarding which man is Caesar and that he was indeed crossing the rubicon and not some other body of water.
I'm not a historian either, but without the roman civil war between caesar and pompey (apparently sparked by the crossing of the rubicon) we just cannot make sense of history and the events that transpire afterwards in egypt and elsewhere. it's so central to the narrative that if we doubt it all else falls into doubt.
The claim that
Quoting Janus
So you don't claim that someone engages in a false inference when they claim that one of their religious experiences produces determinate knowledge? It seems to me that that is precisely what you are saying, ergo:
Quoting Leontiskos
Someone claims that their experience-inference (i.e. the inference they are basing on their religious experience) is verifiable. You claim that it is not verifiable, and that the inference is false or invalid. If the inference is verifiably false/invalid, then the basic claim has been falsified, and what is falsifiable is verifiable. Therefore, your own falsification of the claim shows it to be verifiable. We need not say that the conclusion is false. We need only say that the inference to the conclusion is false or invalid. This nevertheless falsifies the argument-claim in question.
(So if your response is to say, "I am claiming that their conclusion is invalid, not false," my response would be that invalidity secures the point just as well. In that case verification has to do with validity, and invalidity entails verifiability. In that case we can redact my sentence to be, "But he himself asserts that such experience-inferences are false or invalid. Is his assertion verifiable?")
Quoting Janus
Is that an argument, though? It sounds like you are saying, "I can't see how it could be verifiable, therefore it is unverifiable" (which is invalid). And I think @Count Timothy von Icarus is right when he points out that if your methodology is consistently applied there will be nothing at all that is "definitively verifiable." I find that folks who criticize religion or ethics in this manner tend to overestimate the certainty and apodicticity of science.
Quoting Janus
Didn't I already provide you with a method? Does my method not count because it isn't a "microscope"? The relevance of the microscope is the relevance of arbitrary criteria for verification.
Quoting Janus
If you "cannot see how they could be," then you do not have logical grounds for your claim that they are unverifiable. If you want to maintain your claim that they are unverifiable, then you will at least need a valid argument for that claim.
You seem to be conflating knowledge with truth. I say that any claim to propositional knowledge from religious experience is unsupported. Say someone has a religious experience and on the basis of that claims to know that there is an afterlife in heaven. Say for the sake of argument it turns out there is a heaven. Did the person know that based on their experience? No, because they would have to actually die and go to heaven to know there is a heaven.
Or say, that on the basis of her being in a bad mood and a sense of conviction you infer that your wife is cheating on you. Did you know your wife was cheating on you? No. She might be cheating on you or not, therefore your belief might turn out to be correct, but you cannot be said to have known it, it cannot be said that a bad mood and your sense of conviction were evidence that she was having an affair.
I also have such a sense, and it informs my literary, visual art and musical practices as well as architectural and garden design which have been my profession. I have no need to draw any metaphysical conclusions from the fact of my having that sense, and I don't believe it supports any, and I see no evidence that Wittgenstein did either. I think the textual evidence is rather to the contrary.
"
I think that what Wittgenstein means by 'world' is not anything like the phenomenological concept of the 'Lebenswelt" or the lifeworld. The latter is the human world and the animal worlds and it is replete with meanings or valuesdifferent meanings or values for each individual, in the case of humans at least, and different for different kinds of animals (if not individual animals).
So I think that by "world" Wittgenstein means the world of bare facts, which just are what they are. It is human and animal needs and desires which engender values, and those needs and desires as lived experience are outside the realm of brute facts.
I don't agree with Wittgenstein that ethics is transcendental; I think it is pragmatic. I also don't agree that ethics and aesthetics are one, the former is of far more practical importance to human life than the latter. It doesn't really matter to others what I find beautiful (provided I don't attempt to inflict my sense of taste on them), but it does matter to others what I consider to be ethical. But these are questions outside the scope of this thread.
To chime in a bit, experiences such as those of religious ecstasy are in no way inferential, but, rather, experiences. One would determinately know what one experiences just as much as one determinately knows what one sees, hears, etc. in the everyday world. That what one knows oneself to in fact see (a pink elephant for example) is not an illusion, mirage, hallucination, delusion, etc. would, and can only properly be, inference of one type or another. But what one in fact experiences is determinate knowledge by familiarity.
No personal experience, personal knowledge though it is, is verifiable in an empirical sense by any other. What is verifiable is that all others will act in react in like manners to that which one personally experiences of the physical world - and that one's current experiences coherently conform to all of one's former now remembered experiences. But one has no way of verifying what any other's personal experiences are - save via inferences regarding their actions and reactions and trust in what they claim to be true.
As to "knowledge of heaven", suppose a person has a near death experience wherein they experience themselves to float over their momentarily perished body toward some white light (this being a fairly common report historically). This person upon reviving claims knowing that their is a heaven. Their knowledge will certainly not be infallible. But then, neither is any other type of knowledge out there. Can their experience-derived inference of a possible heaven in the afterlife be empirically or else logically disproven on grounds of inconsistencies? It cannot unless one holds an infallible knowledge of physicalism/materialism whereby such afterlife would be metaphysical impossibility.
So, were there to in fact be a heave in the afterlife, then this one person has valid claims to fallible knowledge of it. About just as much as you or I have valid claims to fallible knowledge of anything in the empirical world.
Right, you're just repeating what I've already said above (I think it was in this thread) so I agree. Although in the case of religious experience one experiences feeling, perhaps a sense of profound knowing, maybe accompanied by images. What is experienced is not as determinate as seeing a tree, or a river or a mountain, because we don't just see those things, we can swim in the river, climb the mountain or tree, cut the tree down, take water from the river and so on.
And we know that other see the same trees, rivers and mountains that we do. So, the case is quite different when it comes to perceptual experiences which can be shared compared to religious experiences which are strictly personal.
Quoting javra
I think this is what you refer to.
I disagree with your interpretation if that is what you are referring to. He says propositions cannot express anything higher. To say that the good is metaphysically real is an attempt to express something higher propositionally, and I think that is specifically what he denies is possible.
To be clear, I'm not one to then believe in a Christian concept of Heaven as a place that's eternally divided from a likewise Christian concept of an endless Hell.
That personal observation made, what further validation can one ask for short of the category error wherein one insists that the afterlife must in and of itself be physical/material and thereby empirically verifiable by all in the here and now?
Else asked, given the surplus of near-death experience accounts, on what grounds can one maintain that none of these folk can validly claim fallible knowledge of an afterlife?
I disagree for all the reasons I've already given. I don't believe in "intrinsic intellectual understanding" I don't even really know what it could mean. So-called near-death experiences, assuming for the sake of argument that the reports are both honest and accurate have not been explainedwho knows why they occur?
Quoting javra
But many do believe that and believe it on the basis of some religious experience. Which I think just goes to show how deep confirmation bias can run,
Quoting javra
One could ask for a cogent reason to believe in an afterlife. I've never seen such a thing. I can't prove there is no afterlife, I've just never seen a good reason to believe in one. Also, it's easy to see that people would like to believe in an afterlifethe idea, hell aside, being more palatable than annihilation. So, it's reasonable to infer the role of wishful thinking.
Precisely! But that they have and do occur is about as undeniable as is, say, the claim that REM dreams occur.
Quoting Janus
Hey, I fully agree. The difference between experience as data and inferences regarding it, which is not data. Be this in the spheres of science itself or else in the sphere of comparative religions.
Quoting Janus
This isn't about your beliefs and likes nor about my beliefs and I'll again reiterate that my own personal likes are by in large that of instant "annihilation' of all awareness upon my corporeal death: to me, instant "salvation" form all forms of suffering. It just that I don't believe this to be the case, on rational grounds. All this is, your views or mine, is utterly irrelevant to the issue at hand.
Other than via emotive biases toward the comfort of instant "annihilation" via any metaphysical paradigm that supports this ultimate end of being, how can one rationally disprove the metaphysical possibility of an afterlife?
Notice, I'm not claiming that an afterlife can be proven. I'm only claiming that the fallible knowledge of an afterlife can be as valid as fallible knowledge gets for those who've had near-death experiences.
The difference is that inferences about what is the case and scientific inferences are testable.
Quoting javra
I find this difficult to believe, but perhaps it's just that I love existing more than you do, and so cannot relate
Quoting javra
I've never claimed that the possibility can be disproven. But I for one would need a reason to believe in it, and have been unable to find one.
Quoting javra
I would call it belief, not knowledge, and it is not fallible because it cannot be falsified. Of course that doesn't make it infallible, just useless in my book. What difference could it possibly make to how you live your life, other than as a positive, albeit totally underdetermined, belief? From what I've observed those how have such positive beliefs do not value this life highly enough.
If you would really rather be annihilated and all the evidence, we can have points to the likelihood that you will get your wish (although you won't be there to enjoy getting it), then what possible incentive can there be for you to bother with the vague possibility of an afterlife?
.
No way to verify this, but perhaps you're quite wrong in this appraisal, despite the sincerity of what I previously expressed.
Quoting Janus
Is one's experience of having seen a house in an REM dream a mere belief of one having seen a house in the REM dream ... or does one know what one has oneself experienced? How about one's seeing a house during waking states?
Fallible means possible to be false or else wrong. It does not mean possible to be falsified. So your affirmation is an utter mistake of interpretation in regard to what fallibility and fallibilism entails. M-theory, for one example is fallible (not infallible), but it certainly is not falsifiable ... despite being fallible.
Quoting Janus
Your presumption that "all the evidence points to ..." is founded upon materialistic premises. These are not the premises upon which my metaphysical, and hence ultimately physical, understandings are founded. There's no way to adequately address my own premises in this forum's soundbite form. If you are sincerely curious, though, you can always check out my profile wherein I've placed a link to my personal philosophy. What I've got uploaded so far amply explains why I don't believe in what you call annihilation upon death. Otherwise, the topic is beyond the scope of this discussion.
So back to the issue at hand ...
Depends on how reliable you think memory is. Seeing a house in a waking state is easy enough to verify. Having seen one not so much. Although that said, since memory is not often proven wrong, we might have good reason to trust it.
For about six months I took to writing what I could remember of my dreams. The more I wrote the more I recalled...or was I confabulating on the little bits I did remember? I couldn't tell, but I realized it didn't matter anyway, because either way dream or confabulation is an exercise of the creative imagination, and as a writer that is what is most importrant to me.
Quoting javra
That might be your apparently dogmatic understanding of the term; it's not mine. To be fallible in my lexicon means 'could turn out to be wrong'. If there is no possible way to determine if something is wrong, then it simply cannot turn out to be wrong, and I don't count it as either fallible or infallible.
Quoting javra
This is nonsense as I see it. All evidence is material, meaning something we can observe, or logical, meaning something which can be shown to be necessarily true. If you disagree then present an example of immaterial evidence for anything.
.
It's maybe subtle, but you missed the point I was making. Suppose you see a pink elephant and it in fact is an illusion. So there was no pink elephant in the external world you thought you saw. All fine and dandy. Now, is your experience of seeing a pink elephant which in fact was not there, in and of itself, just a belief ... or do you know that you had an experience of seeing a pink elephant.
As to verifiability in the walking state, it is quite impossible to fully verify every single thing ever seen. Indeed, quite impossible to fully verify every thing one sees at any one given juncture. Most things seen we accept on trust. And not due to empirical verification. It would be exceedingly bizarre otherwise.
But the point remains. When is one's personal experiences ever not knowledge of what one is personally experiencing? To be clear, not of the significance of what one is experiencing, but of the experience itself.
Quoting Janus
Uhm. In short,
Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallibilism
Of course one is free to idiosyncratically define terms as one pleases and then declare that thier quite commonplace usage is a "dogmatic understanding". I'm myself not one to do so.
Quoting Janus
OK: Consciousness, when strictly defined as a first-person point of view, occurs in others out there.
As far as I know, this proposition is neither verifiable via observation nor something which can be shown via logic to be necessarily true. But go ahead and either show me a consciousness out there or else logically evidence why the just expressed proposition is necessarily true logically.
:100: :up:
Very good. I have a précis of Harrison's earlier Fall of Man and Foundations of Science and have read other articles of his. I think that 'history of ideas' approach is indispensable for understanding the present.
You think you see a pink elephant.
Quoting javra
You have whatever you are experiencing, and you have whatever judgements you are making about it.
Nothing in what you quoted form Wikipedia contradicts anything I've said.Quoting javra
It is verifiable beyond reasonable doubt that others are conscious, because we can ask them what they perceive and when it agrees with what we perceive we have no reason to believe they don't perceive what we do.
A thought you based on what experience? Other than that of in fact visually experiencing a pink elephant, an experience which one knows one has had.
Quoting Janus
Again: how is that personally experienced not known to be personally experienced.
Quoting Janus
Sure it does: fallibility is not contingent on being falsifiable. Read the quote again. Again: example: M-theory could be wrong and is thereby fallible, but it is not falsifiable. This is in direct logical contradiction with:
Quoting Janus
Quoting Janus
Yes, but neither via observation nor by being a logically necessary truth, as per the material and logical evidence you've claimed to be the only type of evident to be had. As a reminder, this here;
Quoting Janus
You think you see something which looks like a pink elephant.
Quoting javra
I don't understand the question.
Quoting javra
I don't read that in the passage. Please quote directly from it.
Quoting javra
We observe them telling us what they see
Quoting Janus
I've so far done my best to politely and patiently engage in debate with you, as as debates should be, but you so far don't seem to understand what I find to be rather simple propositions and inferences. And I will not start entering into endless debates on what is is, or the like. This can very well be a failure on my part. Acknowledged. But to be blunt, I've got better things to do. I'm done.
Interesting. Charles Taylor covers some of the same ground in "A Secular Age." An interesting point he makes re empiricism/verification and its relation to historical events and notions of Providence is that people are not "forced to the facts" (as they might be by some experimental conclusion) when it comes to rewriting history on secular terms. It's rather a particular sort of framing.
And it is a framing people get comfortable with. It's fairly uncommon to see historical drama/fiction not depict all the lead characters, or at least the heroes, as post-modern agnostics with contemporary class consciousness, etc.
He has a pretty compelling diagnosis of the psychological impetus for the "disengaged" frame of Hume and Gibbon vis-á-vis questions of religion as well. It represents a sort of control and insulation. At the same time, I think critics (including the post-moderns) have a point that it is always somewhat illusory, while also not being appropriate for all epistemic situations.
Isnt that close in meaning to Taylors buffered self? Which is not coincidental with the advent of liberal individualism and the primacy of the egological point of view.
Ah yes, by "he" I meant Taylor. I feel like the empirical approaches to faith in the article have much to do with adopting the "disengaged" frame. It's a frame that very much lends itself to a "method epistemology," although there is obviously a certain virtue of apatheia elevated here too.
You could contrast it with the virtue epistemology of someone like St. Maximus the Confessor, where the attainment of truth is itself dependent on a deep personal transformation, and where all virtue is ultimately connected to knowledge (and love!).
From my knowledge of Eastern philosophies, this is often a common thread there too. One does not recognize the Dao or come to Enlightenment by withdrawing into a widely accessible frame and applying method to sense data, but it is rather a internal process.
This sort of admonition that spiritual/ascetic therapy must come prior to understand is pretty typical of Eastern Christianity for example:
Eastern Christianity generally tended to avoid the sweep towards empiricism, although this is in part because it often seems suspicious of anything that isn't at least close to a millennia old as "innovation" (which can have its own difficulties :rofl: )