If our senses can be doubted...why can't the contents our of thoughts too?
Hi,
I have some questions about certainty.
I understand that our senses can be doubted. E.g. Everything I 'see' could be an hallucination or an illusion etc.
But I have read lots about the certainty of thoughts.
If I have a conscious thought/belief that I am seeing something, could that thought/belief be doubted?
Or, would the experience of the thought itself mean that you could not doubt the content of the thought itself?
E.g. There appears to be a conscious thought of "I believe I am watching a sunset". Why would that thought be free from any form of doubt about its existence as a thought?
Sorry if this sounds confusing. I think what I mean is:
Why are our thoughts different from our senses in that the content of thoughts cannot be doubted?
I have some questions about certainty.
I understand that our senses can be doubted. E.g. Everything I 'see' could be an hallucination or an illusion etc.
But I have read lots about the certainty of thoughts.
If I have a conscious thought/belief that I am seeing something, could that thought/belief be doubted?
Or, would the experience of the thought itself mean that you could not doubt the content of the thought itself?
E.g. There appears to be a conscious thought of "I believe I am watching a sunset". Why would that thought be free from any form of doubt about its existence as a thought?
Sorry if this sounds confusing. I think what I mean is:
Why are our thoughts different from our senses in that the content of thoughts cannot be doubted?
Comments (167)
So if I have a thought of "I am replying to this person" - I might not be thinking that thought?
But even if the thought was about the external world, the thought would still be the thought?
I mean: I think I am watching my laptop screen.
Of course I might not be, my senses could deceive me.
But despite understanding that my senses could deceive me, I still conclude that I am watching my laptop screen.
The thought itself is certain.
Our senses can be doubted.
But if I 'experience' a thought, then it is certain that that exact thought is happening.
Even if it is an hallucination, or I am a brain in a VAT, the exact thought would be certain?
It wouldn't be possible to be thinking of anything else because there is no awareness of that happening?
No. What could the existence of the thought/belief by doubted by? Only by a thought/belief. Then it would be the case that a thought/belief was doubting its own existence, which is a logical impossibility, as a thought/belief must exist in order for it to doubt its own existence.
"I think therefore I am" is the first principle of Descartes philosophy.
Good question. I think Nietzsche was asking something similar:
My own two cents:
If the certainty youre in search for is that of infallible certainty a certainty that cannot be wrong in principle as well as in practice under any circumstance whatsoever I will fallibly affirm that no such thing can occur.
As to thoughts being doubtable, Im preferential to the bumper-sticker affirmation of, Dont believe everything you think. After all, via judgments, such as those regarding what is and is not real, one will tend to select one of the multiple thoughts and discard all other options as false thoughts regarding the matter. Example 1: is my laptop real? One option available to you will be endorsed and all others rejected upon arriving at a conscious decision regarding the matter. Example 2: I think Earth is both necessarily solid and approximately spherical. And I can of course come to doubt this by consciously asking myself for what justifications I in fact have to think this. (Troubles tend to start when one, for example, thinks the Earth is flat, or else hollow on the inside, and in no way doubts this thought irrespective of the evidence to the contrary.)
As to, not infallible certainty, but the strongest form of fallible certainty that can be had:
Given that one can come to doubt both ones own perceptions and ones own entertained thoughts, can you then come to in any way rationally doubt the following proposition here placed in quotes?
I could try to rationally evidence why this proposition cannot be an infallible certainty - even if its not possible for you to in any way cogently doubt - but so doing would take a considerable amount of reasoning to express. Notwithstanding, I do find this quoted proposition to be an example of the strongest form of fallible certainty that can be had.
(BTW, in case this might be in any way pertinent, this specific strongest fallible certainty just specified will in no way then provide either rational or empirical evidence to the effect of there not occurring similar aware beings in existence at large other than yourself.)
Nietzsche is right to point out that people naturally separate the "I" from the "thought".
However, this cannot be the case, otherwise it would lead into the homunculus problem of infinite regression.
It is more likely that "I" is the thought rather than it is the "I" that is having the thought.
It still remains the case that a thought cannot doubt itself.
Doesn't this entail that with each change in thought thunk there will then necessarily be an ontological change in the "I" addressed? If so, how can the same "I" be privy to different thoughts?
Ive wanted to dwell on this passage before but never found the occasion. So . . . what are the actual objections FN is raising here?
It is I who think Not sure what the alternative would be. Joe? God?
It has to be something at all which thinks Again, the alternative? Perhaps thinking is a happening which I observe? OK, not impossible.
Thinking is an activity and operation on the part of an entity thought of as a cause Yes, this one is easily doubted. We have no idea how cause and effect might apply here.
An 'I' exists We could use the quotes around ?I to make a distinction on FN's behalf, and say that this ?I may not be what actually exists, but rather our mistaken personification of it, or some such. But using ?I in its ordinary sense of me, it would be incorrect to say that I dont exist, wrong though I may be about who or what I am.
What is designated by 'thinking' has already been determined - that I know what thinking is Same point about distinction-drawing. The quotes around ?thinking invite us to problematize the use of the word, and wonder whether what were calling ?thinking here is the real deal, actual thought, or some such. But regardless if we call it thinking or shminking, we do know the event in question when it happens, however wrong we might be about its nature.
Does anyone know what he means here? Why does "immediate" contradict "certainty"?
I can only presume that what he intended by "immediate certainty" was something like "a certainty that is prior to any reasoning or empirical, else experiential, evidence". In this manner thereby being what can then be termed "infallible certainty".
I'm in agreement with all your comments, btw. Maybe FN's key objection to the cogito was to a possible reification of what the term "I" references that might have been typical in his day; here specifically thinking of the Cartesian "res cogitans" and "res extensa" distinction (such that FN might have disagreed with this dichotomy?). My best guess, at any rate.
Yes, for each change in thought there will be an ontological change in the "I". Are you the same person you were ten years ago?
There is the question of identity through time. The "I" is not just the thought being had at the present moment in time, but is the complete set of thoughts stored as memories that stretch back into the distant past.
The problem is, if the "I" is separate to its thoughts, then how can the "I" know about its thoughts? The "I " can only know about the thoughts it has if these thoughts are an intrinsic part of the "I", such that "I" is its thoughts.
If the "I" is separate to its thoughts, the question is, how can the "I" be privy to any thoughts at all?
Come to think of it, you might(?) be here referring not to the though/belief itself but the very experience of the thought/belief. If so:
While we can come to doubt the content of what we experience (be this an experienced perception or an experienced thought/belief) that we so experience at the given present time will likewise so be "a strongest form of fallible certainty'.
For example: you are seeing a pink elephant. You can come to doubt whether or not you are in fact so seeing a pink elephant in the external world or else are hallucinating a pink elephant in the external world. But the fact that you so experience visually at time X remains a fact regardless.
I'm no sure what you mean by "separate". The "I" for example is not separate from its perceptions in so far as these perceptions are only so because they are perceived by the "I" - being in fact contingent on the "I"s awareness. Same with all thoughts. And we seem to agree on perceptions, at least, being doubtable all the same.
As to the question you ask, the answer I offer is: via its faculties of awareness.
You express the following thought to me, A circle has four sides. I may reply, Not sure what you are thinking here, but a square has four sides. Is this not doubting what thoughts you may have about circles.? You might want to say, Well privately, I know what I am referring to or thinking about. Sure, you have thoughts that no one understands, but how could we agree that they are thoughts at all!?
As Nietzsche wrote:
What gives me the right to say that the "I" causes thoughts, as if the "I" is separate to the thoughts it has?
I agree that the "I" is not separate to either its perceptions or thoughts. But what are the implications of this? The implication is that perceptions and thoughts are an intrinsic part of the "I".
In the same way, iron is an intrinsic part of the Eiffel Tower. Remove the iron, and what is left? Nothing.
Remove the perceptions and thoughts, and what is left? Nothing. There is no "I" remaining.
Long story short, most typically, the "I" decides upon which thoughts to uphold and then upholds these, with such options of possible thoughts to uphold being "caused" (which I find to be an ill-suited term, but all the same) by the unconscious mind rather than by the "I".
Quoting RussellA
I did not claim that the "I" is not separate from its perceptions or thoughts, I only asked you to clarify what you mean by "separate". This, to be honest, because so far it seems as though you are reifying the mind and its components (e.g. individual thoughts and percepts) into having similar characteristics to physical things in the external world, which can indeed be separated givens.
Here's one example: if the "I" is not (in some non-physical way) separate from either its thoughts or percepts, then how can thoughts in any way of themselves be separate from percepts? Yet to see a house (a percept) is indeed utterly separate from contemplating the concept/thought of "house". And one does not need to see a house when so contemplating the concept, nor contemplate the concept when seeing a house.
In the mind, there can be the concept of a house and the thought of a particular house. These are different things. I agree that there can be a concrete example of an abstract concept.
Quoting javra
The Indirect Realist would argue that we never directly see the house, but only perceive a representation of a particular house.
Both the concept of a house and the representation of a particular house exist in the mind, and in this sense are not utterly separate, as both exist in the mind.
Yes, true, but the concept filled with sense data (in the IDR sense) is not synonymous with the concept. It's a particular, modified expression of the concept in a Platonic sort of way, i think. They do both exist in the mind, but one has been triggered by (physical) information from outside the mind. THe other is a rehashing of some of our oldest data. I would not think these the same.
I agree that thought in the now is the reality. The certainty of thought in the now is embedded in the experience of self. You can be 100% certain that whatever thought is going through your mind in this now is an accurate reflection of who and what you are in this now, as thought is part of your experience of your self (even if based on a hallucination). In the next now, your memory of your thought in the previous now could be inaccurate, but your experience of thought in the current now is never inaccurate. Even if your senses are all messed up and inaccurate, your thoughts are giving you an accurate experience of your messed up senses. You can be uncertain about your senses, but never be uncertain about your thoughts - they are what you are. Your thoughts are consciousness of self in relation to everything else.
Good guess. He may be poking fun at people who can't imagine that their experiences might ever lead them astray.
Quoting javra
And that's perfectly fair, when stated a bit more carefully. Paul Ricoeur made a similar point in "The Question of the Subject" which is worth quoting in full:
Nor do we need Freudian theory, strictly speaking, to drive the wedge Ricoeur is talking about. We are all now comfortable with the idea that consciousness can be false consciousness, that we may mistake the picture it seems to paint of a thriving, masterful self. The greater part of "me" may dwell underwater, as it were.
I love that! Yes indeed.
It's interesting that serious meditation practice, especially in Hinduism and Buddhism, makes this point vivid. My understanding is that an experienced meditator would agree that there is indeed no "I" remaining -- but this does not show that consciousness requires an object. For pure consciousness is said to remain, even in the absence of the "I" and its objects. Of course we're free to raise an eyebrow at that, but there's a lot of testimony to the validity of this experience.
So if I have a thought of "I am watching a sunset"
It would not be certain that I am watching a sunset (potentially inaccurate senses) BUT it would be certain that there is a belief of watching a sunset.
The belief would be certain.
The accuracy of the thought may be doubted, of course.
I think I'm watching my laptop drink a milkshake. Well, I certainly am thinking that. But it's not accurate.
Again, nicely expressed. As to the raised eyebrow, without the meditater's active awareness of this transient ego-death which can reputedly occur during meditation - which, as active awareness, is clearly not that of an I that can only occur in relation to something not-I, i.e. which is not a duality-bound ego - the person would have no way of experiencing, much less recalling, the occurrence. Often enough as something associated with a moment of bliss. I believe it's this non-dualistic ego of active awareness that remains at such junctures of transient ego-death which then gets addressed as "pure consciousness". Without it, one might just as well be entering and then emerging from out of a state of coma.
I agree. I may have the concept of a house in my mind. If I perceive something that I understand as one instantiation of my concept of a house, then I perceive this something as a house.
What would this consciousness be conscious of, if not the "I" or object of thought?
The more mysticalish parts of me then associates this very issue with the well known dictum from the Oracle at Delphi: "know thyself". Or at least endeavor to best understand? :grin:
Yeah, that's the challenge. We'd really need a different way of talking about how experience and memory work at the "below-ego" level.
Quoting javra
And this is also spot on. Even assuming the meditator could recall "leaving" and "returning" to the "I", why is it bliss instead of coma? I have a whole hobby-horse I could get on about how little we understand about what consciousness really is, but I'll stay off it. Suffice it to say that deep meditation experiences may turn out to be crucial for a better theory.
Yes, exactly. What's left? Would you reject out of hand the possibility that "God-realization" is a term, however fuzzy and encrusted with doctrines, that tries to answer this question?
The "I" here ceases to be entwined with thought, emotion, or perception - but instead is said to become, or else transcend into, pure awareness devoid of any duality. Here accepting that one is not any thought one thinks of - these thoughts and emotions and possible percepts instead being likened to ripples on a pond which should be fully calmed till no disturbance of awareness occurs. This, at least, as I've heard the experience of such meditation described.
Quoting J
:grin: :up:
Quoting javra
Pure consciousness. I'll have to mediate on that.
The way they are different is not essentially about comparable states of doubt. Doubt is the product of thought. The activity of thinking is different from the activity of perception. There is no second doubter who needs to be satisfied if the first one is okay.
A distinction is needed between the problems of input and those of thinking as what is happening. Aristotle noted that the two modes cannot be reduced into one because they are active and/or passive in different ways. It is obvious that the two modes must have something to do with each other. Aristotle pretty much left it there.
Bang on. The content of your thoughts is brute. Whether its veridical, we can discuss.
Yes, and this pertains as well to the "content of you" -- of the "I" who is doing the thinking. As Ricoeur notes, above, the experience of the "I" is brute, while its nature is open to a great deal of interpretation and discussion.
Yes. I think of the cogito as what I can never get away from. Gangster stuff.
There's an interesting character, rather obscure, called Franklin Merrell Wolff. He was a Harvard and Yale-educated maths prodigy who underwent a profound realisation, along the lines of Advaita Vedanta, and thereafter wrote on esoteric philosophy.
[quote=Wikipedia;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_Merrell-Wolff]In his book Pathways Through to Space, Wolff describes having a profound spiritual realization in 1936, which provided the basis for his transcendental philosophy. It was induced "in a context of sustained reflective observation and deep thought," rather than by the usual practice of meditation. He called this experience the "Fundamental Realization". In its aftermath, Wolff found himself being in a state of euphoric consciousness he called the "Current of Ambrosia", which he described as being "above time, space and causality". It also led Wolff to a state of "High Indifference", or consciousness without an object. At the center of these experiences was the realization of "Primordial consciousness", which, according to Wolff, is beyond and prior to the subject or the object and is unaffected by their presence or absence.[/quote]
Something similar can be found in the early Buddhist texts (and notwithstanding the doctrinal differences between Vedanta and Buddhism.) The meditator is said to ascend through the various 'stages of jhana' which include 'states of neither perception nor non-perception. Of course, such states of pure consciousness are exceedingly difficult to realise in practice, but in Eastern lore, they are amply documented. The difficulty being, from a philosophical perspective, that they're all well outside the bounds of discursive reason.
I'll have to check him out, thanks.
Quoting Wayfarer
I started to write "Yes" but then I asked myself, "Well, why exactly?" What's so exceptional about such a claim that puts it outside anything we can reason about? Is the experience itself seen as so esoteric as to defy description, and perhaps credulity? This may be a Western bias.
So we doubt our senses except when belief is triggered. Philosophy as a machine in that system, necessarily suspends belief while it examines the structures of the thoughts.
That's a pithy and reasonable observation and I've often had similar reactions.
I was responding to:
Quoting J
Thats what caused me to mention Franklin Merrell-Wolff, as he has written on the theme of consciousness without an object. I cant really recommend his books, they're not particularly good reads, but I do recognize in him a re-statement of the fundamental theme of Advaita Vedanta:
Quoting Wikipedia
I think it's well understood that meditative states may induce or lead to radically different cognitive modes in which things appear in a very different light. That is now being explored through the scientific study of meditation and mindfulness practises (I've acquired a copy of the Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Meditation although I've barely dipped into it yet. )
So to try and tackle your question as to why these insights elude discursive analysis, I think it's because such states require a deep kind of concentration and inner tranquility which is removed from the normal human state. Hence the emphasis on askesis and self-training in the contemplative traditions. Part of this, as noted by others, is the attenuation or dimunition of the sense of self or 'me and mine', which is the typical but implicit background of so much of our mental lives.
It's tricky.
Quoting Wayfarer
It isn't quite accurate to say that it's "a tiny percentage of people, who claim it cannot be described." Again, the Western bias -- for us, it's a tiny percentage, but in cultures that take this kind of experience for granted, it's seen as remarkable but not at all unusual, and it's been going on for millennia. Not many people get to have these experiences (according to this view) because the self-training is so rigorous and time-consuming. Compare being in the top 1% of tensor algebraicists. That's what, maybe 100 people? But we don't doubt they really have the experiences they have, because in theory anyone else can have them too, if they have a natural gift and are willing to put in the many, many, many hours of practice.
As for claiming it can't be described, I would say, Yes and no. Such experiences put us at the limit of what words can say. But make the comparison with esoteric math again: If you asked such a mathematician to "describe the experience" of having a mathematical insight, I wonder what you'd get. Similarly, reports about ego-loss or enlightenment states are hard to understand, but we can say something about them -- for instance, that the experience is usually described as blissful and beneficial, as opposed to painful and destructive. Notice here that language has moved from discursive rationality to descriptions of emotion and value -- that may be a clue.
Quoting J
Nirvana can readily be described via discursive reason, and can well align in most such interpretations to "a completely nondualistic awareness* ". And, although it might not be airtight, and although it utilizes discursive reasons / reasoning atypical of most Western thought, the learned Buddhist can discursively justify via reasoning the ontic reality of Nirvana just fine. This such as via discursive reasoning regarding the underpinnings of the Noble Eightfold Path.
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* as one referenced example of this:
Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nondualism#Buddhism
The understanding of all this being contingent on discursive reasoning.
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Quoting J
:up:
And then, what evidence is there that emotion and value cannot themselves possibly be subject to some measure of the discursive rationality which we consciously engage in? But it is a different playing field, so to speak, to that of formal western logics all the same.
You can even doubt whether your thoughts are yours or a Demon put them in your mind. What you cannot doubt is that you are an agent with the capacity to experience.
Freud's depiction of 'the mystical' was as 'a feeling of oceanic bliss', which he characteristically described as an unconscious memory of existence in the womb (that comprising the full extent of his epistemological repertoire). There is an element of truth in that, but I think there is rather more to it! Certainly the sense of union seems fundamental, so too the dissolving of the sense of otherness which pervades normal existence. After all that is one of the meanings of 'non-dual'.
But it's something far more than emotion, no matter how exalted. Emotion is a visceral reaction. It is rather an intellectual (or noetic or gnostic) insight, an insight into 'the way things truly are'. Recall Parmenides prose poem, in which he 'travels beyond the gates of day and night', symbolising duality. The Greek, Indian, Persian and Chinese traditions all have these kinds of elements at their origin, but due to our
Quoting J
They are seen as outside the scope of 'rational discourse' due to their association with religious revelation rather than empirical science. Of course, the times are changing, and there are many ways in which this is no longer true. I think they're regaining a place at the table, finally.
I cant argue with that. It most certainly wont be any form of emotion by which one is in any way affected for then there would be a necessarily occurring duality between that which affects and that affected.
I however do tend to think that this intellectual (noetic or gnostic) insight you mention is to here lean heavily on Buddhist tradition an aspect of, or else resulting from, the Noble Eightfold Path which as path of itself leads toward Nirvana, maybe as it was previously quoted via reference in my previous post: to at least in part entail an infinite (limitless or unbounded) non-dual awareness that is of itself neither subject or awareness nor object of awareness but both in a utterly nondual manner. As that toward which the path then leads, I can so far only presume that its so termed bliss will neither be either purely intellectual nor purely emotive but, here again, something that embodies both in however completely nondual manners. (Maybe a potential future moment in which we come to truly know /understand / make-intelligible what we are as being (no longer plural at that juncture since it by definition can only be perfectly nondualistic in all ways).)
Happiness and suffering, after all, pertain to the intellect itself, the intellect in essence being the understanding which understands anything it stands in dualistic relation to: concepts, ideas, beauties, truths, etc. (to include an understanding of ordinary physical objects). And the first-person experience of happiness and suffering is in many a way emotive this rather than intellectual in the sense of something which the intellect contemplates.
To be clear, however, though most typically unified, I here understand suffering to be other than pain and happiness to be other than pleasure. The first is far easier to blatantly evidence via example: A marathon runner will be in pain but will not experience suffering unless they cant finish the race despite their wishes, being both in pain and utterly happy shortly after so finishing the race. (Sorry for this next extreme example but its the most poignant example I can currently think of to drive the point home:) Its well enough documented that a women being raped (which ought to be understood as a non-consensual act of violence by definition hence, utterly different from, say, S&M which is fully consensual) can experience horrific suffering while she can as happens for certain women simultaneously experience pleasure on account of her vaginas reaction to the event, this typically bringing the woman into even more horrific suffering on account of her now additional experience of shame and guilt in so feeling pleasure from the event (and event which, again, is an act of violence unconsensually imposed upon her, to say the least).
So, while Im not claiming that the intellect, the understanding (which is of itself one with awareness), experiences pleasures and pains, it is - or at least I so maintain - nevertheless that which experiences happiness and suffering. And the latter are not so much intellectual as they are emotive states of being of the intellect emotive states of being of the intellect via which the intellect then intellectualizes anything whatsoever (this dualistically between the intellect and that which it intellectualizes, like a concpet) . Bliss, then, by definition being perfect or else perfected happiness (and not perfect pleasure).
Quoting Wayfarer
My suspicion is that it has a lot more to do with physicalism as incongruous obstacle to this realm of the real than it does with the lack of rational discourse regarding it - with empirical science of itself playing no role either way in the issue. Buddhist, for example, are typically not adverse to science itself or to what it has to say. Time will tell though.
BTW, putting my perennial philosophy hat on, can you think of any good reason why the Buddhist notion of Nirvana (at least it was addressed in my previous post) is not an epistemic understanding of the very same non-physical ontic reality which in Platonism and Neoplatonism gets termed the Good this as interpreted via the lenses of two otherwise very distinct cultures, and as reasoned via their respective ways of prioritizing premises and their derived conclusions?
One side says things along the lines of it being non-dualistic bliss; the other says things along the line of it being perfected eudemonia; this being no difference whatsoever. Both say things along the lines of it being beyond time and space, of it being completely limitless and unbounded, of it being transcendent of both existence and nonexistence, and both prescribe virtue as means of better approaching it, etc.
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Ill only add that, as can be found at least implied in some interpretations of Buddhism, it, Nirvana (/ the Good), is sometimes taken to be something that is obtainable on a person-by-person basis. As though a person can actualize Nirvana-without-remainder despite all other people in the world not so actualizing. In many another Buddhist interpretation, however, I find reason to interpret the actualization of Nirvana-without-remainder being something global and thereby globally awaiting (not mere awareness of it, but its very actualization) this, for example, such as can be found in many instantiations of the Bodhisattva vow *. That being said, to here make a potentially far longer perspective short: as per what can be found expressed in the movie A Fish Called Wanda, I however take it that the central message of Buddhism is not Every man for himself." :wink:
* for example:
Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodhisattva_vow#In_Mah%C4%81y%C4%81na_sutras
The same as is problematical. They may appear the same to us, but (for example) Buddhists and Brahmins have spent millenia debating their differences. (It was instructive to observe the attitudes of traditionally-trained Buddhist scholastics towards Vedanta on Dharmawheel forum, which was generally dismissive.) The theosophical, many paths but one mountain attitude has its advocates, but Buddhists and indeed adherents of the other schools often take great pains to differentiate themselves. But it can take quite a bit of study to appreciate the distinctions (not to mention familiarity with Sanskrit in the case of Indian religions.)
Obviously there are many convergences and resonances, but there are also distinctions. Case in point - like a lot of my generation, I once had the popular Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, trs W Y Evans-Wentz, which featured extensive comparisons of Tibetan Buddhism and Plotinus. But later translators point out that Evans-Wentz, a Theosophist, never left California during his work on that translation, and relied entirely on a single translator. A much later edition of the same text is vastly different to the Evans-Wentz version even though nobody casts doubt on his noble intentions. Myself, I dont think it hurts to see the common threads in these traditions, but only up to a point. It might validly be argued that what unites them is more important than what divides them but the distinctions ought to be born in mind.
But then, this whole topic is very much the subject of silk road spirituality, where all these great traditions mingled and debated. Fascinating topic in its own right.
So you find in your post "good reasons" for why the two are in fact not one and the same ontic reality - differently interpreted, of course. Correct me if I'm wrong, but that's how your post so far read's to me. So then you take it that those who gain "insights" via religious ecstasy within different cultures will in fact attain understanding of utterly different non-physical ultimate realities, or at least find the possibility for this being the case? I must admit, such a plurality of ultimate realities with each of these being in itself universally applicable makes little sense to me - rationally that is. Unless they were all to be BS, in which case I'd personally find the stance intelligible. But fair enough. Thanks for your answer.
By "ontic" I intended: Pertaining to being, as opposed to pertaining to a theory of it (which would be ontological).. Otherwise I would have said, "ontological".
By "reality" I intended: that which is actual, this in contrast to fictional (i.e., fantasy).
Sure, I get that. And I'm not trying to be contrary or antagonistic, generally speaking I find in you a kindred spirit. But the vocabulary of 'ontic' and 'ontology' is Greek rather than Buddhist.
Plotinus: Ontological Monism
The One is beyond, yet the source, of all being.
Reality is hierarchy: the One ? Intellect ? Soul ? the material world.
The return to the One is a ascent of soul realizing its divine origin through contemplation, culminating in henosis.
The One is a positive ontological principleultimate, simple, ineffable, and yet the ground of all.
Buddhism: No ultimate unitary source
All phenomena (dharmas) are empty of inherent existence (??ny?).
Even nirv??a is not a separate realm but the cessation of clinging and conceptual proliferation.
The highest realization is not union with a supreme being, but insight into the non-dual, inter-dependent, and empty nature of phenomena.
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That's pretty much a textbook description of the distinctions. That said, arguments can and have been made for a 'transcendent unity' among different diverse traditions and the case can be made - I myself often make it. But it has to take into account the real distinctions also.
You can doubt anything, but the fact that you are doubting cannot be doubted, hence the only certainty in the universe. Wasn't it the idea of Cartesianism?
"I think therefore I am" is not an affirmation, but inference. He was still doubting his own existence, and the possibility that he thinks. But his doubt on it couldn't be doubted.
I think X implies I am doubting. For instance, I think God exists, I think there are ghosts, I think the world will end soon, I think I am thinking .... etc are all implications of doubting.
So if you perceive something, it is not certain you perceived it? Some thing .dont matter what it is .gets right in front of your eyes, but you doubt that thing made the trip from the front to the back of your eye? Why wouldnt it? Whats to prevent it? All necessary presuppositions being given, of course, re: awake and aware, intellectually/physiologically functional.
How does your eye know how to deceive you? How .indeed, why .would your fingertips, when sensing roughness (of sandpaper), pass on to your brain the sensation of smoothness (of the fridge door handle)? Why is it always that the odor of bacon is never sensed by the ear?
In the same way it is certain for any thought that exact thought is happening, it is just as certain for any perception that exact perception is happening. By the same token, that the content of thought is impossible to deny, so too is the content of perception impossible to deny.
Nobody said, nor is anyone justified in saying, the mere reality of empirical content of sense, nor the mere rational content of thought, means knowledge of what either one is, and, with respect to the original question, the difference between our thought and our senses cannot be determined by whether or not their respective content is susceptible to doubt.
Since at least Plato knowledge that is not the same as knowledge of, more recently, in Russell 1912, knowledge by acquaintance vs knowledge by description.
I think we're getting confused by different meanings of "perceived". What @Kranky seems to mean is "perceive" as in "correctly identify an object of the senses." So, for instance, when we fall victim to a mirage, then the answer to your question would be, "It is not certain at all that I perceived an oasis, although I seemed to." And this contrasts with entertaining a thought, which is supposed to be immune from that kind of mistake.
But I think you mean "perceive" as in "experience a sense-perception event", in which case the answer to the question is different: "Yes, it's certain that this has occurred, but -- see above -- I could be wrong about the nature of it." Here, as you point out, we're on the same basis with perception as we are with thoughts.
And we should remember that what goes for "objects" goes for the subject too. I can be certain of my subjectivity while holding in question what this "I" might be.
Even if that were the case, isnt it necessarily presupposed there is an object to identify, correctly or otherwise? If so, then deny that very same necessary object as a content of perception, is contradictory, from which it follows ..barring absurdity .that object itself cannot be doubted.
That is how I read the idea of not being a pilot in Meditations:
It is "Cogito, Ergo Sum" or I think, therefore I am. There is a comma between "I think" and "therefore I am"
I agree that the sentences "I think that ghosts exists" and "I think that I am" imply doubt that "ghosts exist" and "I am".
But no doubt is implied in "I think, therefore I am", as these are independent thoughts.
At the start of the Second Meditation, Descartes wrote the following:
I have the thought that nothing exists in the external world
Does it follow that I don't exist?
No, because if I have a thought then I must exist.
Yes. Philosophically, I prefer your way of understanding "perceive" to the more common usage in which we can be flat "wrong" about perceptual experiences.
If you think that nothing exists in the external world, how your having a thought proves you must exist?
Surely you are a part of the world. No?
Yes, it does. If nothing exists, then you cannot exist.
Yes, I am part of the world, but we must distinguish between that part of the world that is external to me and that part of the world that is internal to me.
I am part of the world and the Moon is part of the world, but the Moon is external to me.
But how can the internal exist without the external? Does your skin exist? Your skin is external to you.
This raises the question, how can the Universe exist without there being anything external to it?
It follows that the universe has the external somewhere.
How could we ever know such a thing?
The Idealism of Berkeley doesn't think that anything physical exists outside the mind.
From reasoning and inference.
Quoting RussellA
Mind doesn't have outside or inside. Whatever appears in mind must exist, if they could be observed and verified as existing.
Isn't the Moon, something that has a diameter of 3,475 km, outside the mind?
It exists in the physical world with no relation to the mind. However, when you perceive it, it appears in your mind. It doesn't exist in your mind. Your mind just sees it. Seeing is not existing itself.
:up:
But Mww, I thought you were a Kantian (I recall from some time ago). He would never allow that kind of thing. Objects of perception are not to be denied empirically, but philosophically, doubt is a mild word for what he thinks.
Thats all I meant to say, in negating the claim the senses can be doubted.
Quoting Astrophel
Which would be a more appropriate word, do you think? And, to what would that word be applicable?
What he thinks .covers a lot of ground. Got something in particular in mind, relative to his doubting?
Doubt is something that comes into play in a setting where things that are not doubted have some reasonable status. Kant is not talking about doubting the sun will rise tomorrow. He talking about the nature of sun rising itself. This is why his thinking is called transcendental: reality is not seen, doubted, affirmed, denied, and the rest. Reality is entirely "other".
Kant's fatal flaw was in not seeing that this radical other cannot be other than that which is called representation, for nothing can stand outside of this other. Metaphysics subsumes physics, not say that physicists are metaphysicians, but to say that physics, and all science and the everydayness of the world, IS also something else entirely.
But then, what contributions does "the mind" make to "the moon" being the moon when it encounters that out there we call the moon? Clearly the moon is not simply in one's mind, but nor is the moon simply out there. It is the simplicity that spoils this response, for to say the mind "just sees it" is to ignore the question of epistemic distance as if it didn't exist. Science may do this, for this is not the kind of thing it thinks about, but philosophy? This is where philosophy begins.
not quite. It holds that what is out there IS the perceptual reality of God's perceiving. You know, God is in the quad, as it goes. Not to say this is right, but at least it tries make some sense of the participation of mind in the event of perceptual discovery. God dominated philosophy back then, but the problem remains, addressed by phenomenology only.
I mean, think about it: what is scienctific knowledge and how does it present to me the moon as it is? One has to look not at the quantification, for this doesn't give us anything but relational structures in a system that is ontologically distinct from the presence of the moon itself. Or just plain familiarity. If you see a thing once, and it is sui generis whatever it is, then it is, being sui generis, alien to understanding, and always will be. But introduce this into public scrutiny and its categories historically generated, again and again, it becomes familiar, (see Wittgenstein's Lecture on Ethics for his own example) not by what it is, for this hasn't changed at all, but for the assimilation into the already familiar. But what in the presuppositions of this familiarity establishes the thing to be what it is, or what it has come to be? More relational and mathematical quantifications, which themselves are clearly NOT that thing.
There is this impossible epistemic and thus ontological distance between knowledge and the world, until, that is, this distance is closed.
If there is a thing having reasonable status by my understanding of it, which implies a non-contradictory judgement, why would I invite doubt to come into play? Doubt arises when the status of a thing is understood as something less than reasonable, meaning, in short, the concepts under which the representation of the thing is subsumed, do not belong to each other with sufficient justice.
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Quoting Astrophel
Reality is entirely other, by definition, re: that which corresponds to sensation in general. How he came up with that definition is an example of his transcendental thinking, but it is not a proper indication of why his thinking is called transcendental. Given his definition of what thinking is, it is clear not all his thinking, nor anyones for that matter, is transcendental, but is only so from the relation of conceptions, or the origin of the ideas, contained in it.
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Quoting Astrophel
This other .the aforementioned other, as in, reality? That which corresponds to sensation in general can never be representation, so youre saying Kant was mistaken in not realizing it actually is? So he got his entire paradigm-shifting, drop-your socks, OMG metaphysical do-over .wrong????
Nahhhh, he didnt get it wrong; other folks just think they got it more right, when all they really got, was different.
People have non contradictory judgments all the time in "their understanding," no? After all, understanding like this does not play out universally, and so people have entangled doubts about many things, but this is just incidental. Less than reasonable given what one understands has no philosophical status. So the concepts involved in some matter or other are not found in the scope of Kantian critique. Even in science, these are "paradigms" of science. Science itself has doubts. But again, this is not a Kantina issue, not an ontological or epistemological issue. These themes begin with doubt, that is, arguments that look at, say, how it is that a judgment can be both about the world and be apriori, and conclude to something that excludes doubt, affirmation, conditional propositional making and the rest.
Quoting Mww
Thinking for Kant is synthetic, and to think about how this is so, or what its nature is, must be done in the very medium that is under analysis. This is the basis for positing the transcendental. Thinking shows us a world, as Wittgenstein will say, but cannot show us what thinking is.
The origin of ideas? What do you mean by this?
Not all his thinking is transcendental? Well, it's all analytic. And it leads to claims of what is transcendental.
Quoting Mww
What exists for Kant that can be talked about at all? Concepts without intuitions are empty, intuiitons without concepts are blind. So what is "there" is a synthesis, and one cannot reasonable talk about one absent the other lest having the transcendental dialectic come down one, that is reason wandering off by itself creating illusory thinking. This is what Michel Henry calls "the lost desert of the Dialectic" where subectivity and everything else goes to die, because nothing escapes prison of representational status. The world reduced to representation, not itself "really" there, but something "other".
What he got wrong is that noumenon is supposed to be an all encompassing metaphysics entirely outside of possible understanding. But how does one arrive at such a concept if not for evidence that issues from the phenomenon? What he discovers in judgment that is apriori is entirely possessed by the discovery itself, and to separate the phenomenon from the noumenon places a limitation on the latter, draws a line where one begins and the other ends, but this is impossible, for one would have to have a vision of both sides to do this. Again, this is Wittgenstein's argument against metaphysics. But this is not to say nothing is transcendental at all. It is to say everything is transcendental; that the transcendental IS the immanental. How can this be? The world we live in is BOTH.
This is what Kant missed. Philosophers miss this because, an analytic anglo american thinking , transcendentalism is off limits. They are just positivists drunk on the success of science.
Concepts involved in some manner or other are found in every aspect of Kantian critique.
Quoting Astrophel
Not all thinking for anybody is synthetic, re: principles. But I agree all analysis of the nature of thinking must be done from within the medium being analyzed.
Quoting Astrophel
Quoting Astrophel
Its all both?
Transcendental refers to a certain mode of cognition, so, no, not all his thinking is in that mode, even if he made a name for himself by rebutting Hume in the proving the possibility of it and validity of its use.
Transcendental this or transcendental that merely describes the origin of, and the limitations for, the conceptions in use. There is empirical thinking, rational thinking .hell, theres magical thinking. Transcendental thinking is just a higher level of plain ol thinking.
Quoting Astrophel
A ultra-modern phenomenologist chastising an Enlightenment continental philosopher. Wheres the news or indeed the value .in that?
Quoting Astrophel
Supposed to be? Who says? How can anything entirely outside possible understanding be supposed at all, much less supposed as an all-encompassing metaphysic? Noumena is nothing but a conception, for which there is no possible representation, which, incidentally, falsifies the claim that all subjectivity is imprisoned by them.
No, the meaning here is that Kant is talking about a specific critique, not some matter or other that is merely incidental. Incidental things are bracketed in Kant, and attention is solely on the formal structure of logic. Kant cares little, if at all, for the content of judgments.
Quoting Mww
No. All thinking is synthetic. A thought at all is the application of a universal. 'Tree' is a universal, subsuming particulars under a general idea, so when we say, Look at that tree, the understanding grasps the particular in the universal. Even when one is talking about things in a most particular way, zeroing in on the uniqueness, one is making a synthetic judgment.
Quoting Mww
No, it does not refer to a certain mode of cognition. It refers to the structure of thought itself.
No, not just conceptions in use. He says: "The term 'transcendental', that is to say, signifies such knowledge as concerns the a priori possibility of knowledge, or its a priori employment." thus, it is a feature of all knowledge claims. He divides logic into its parts in the analytical attempt to discover that which is in thought itself that is transcendental. He says, "Logic, again, can be treated in a twofold manner, either as logic of the general or as logic of the special employment of the understanding," as a move to dismiss special employment of the understanding so that he can arrive at the general, where he will begin his Deduction to show how the pure forms determined.
Quoting Mww
Or better, where is the argument in this statement? Henry is not ultra modern. He is considered post, post modern, responding the Nietzschean element of post modern nihilism that sways philosophy toward a radical dismissal of metaphysics. Kant is seen as starting this. Heidegger, too. Not atheism, but a critique that throws cold water over all metaphysics. This is continental philosophy, and the issues are timeless, and Henry is right in the middle.
the value? What is the value of doing philosophy? What is the value of continental philosophy's issues?
Quoting Mww
Kant's is a philosophy of the self, subjectivity. So ask Kant what subjectivity is and what to you get? The transcendental unity of apperception. All things end up HERE. This is why he is a transcendental philosopher. Noumena is, as you say, a mere conception, but it is played against phenomena, the empirical world we live and breathe in. When he talks about things in themselves, he is not wasting space. He has to talk about this if he is going to talk about the finitude of things that are not what they are "in themselves".
The prison: Calling all phenomena not what things really are in themselves, puts human knowledge in a place where thought cannot escape TO the things themselves. Reality, what is really real is structually beyond grasp.
But how can it be closed?
Our only direct knowledge is that of the sensations in our five senses.
We perceives shapes and colours, relations and quantities, which are clearly not the thing in the world.
From these sensations alone we infer a world that has caused these sensations
We can only make inferences when moving from the epistemology of our sensations to the ontology of a presumed world, but inference is not knowledge
Even though we only know our own sensations, there is an intersubjective agreement about things like the Moon, but is this public agreement about our intersubjective sensations or about a thing in the world causing these sensations?
It is definitely the case that the Moon doesn't exist in me when I am seeing it. It exists out there in space somewhere. It also is the case that the Moon causes the image to appear in my mind when I am seeing it, because when some nights it is raining or cloudy, the image of the Moon doesn't appear in my mind at all even if I try to see it.
A lot of processes happen physiologically, neurologically and chemically in the body and brain when we see an object. It is not a simple event even if we say "I see it there" sounding simple.
The image of the Moon in our mind is not the biological, neurological or chemical substance in the brain or retina, but something immaterial which emerged from the brain as an abstract entity which is the same nature as concepts.
Science can only describe what are observable. The hidden and unobservable parts of the world for them are same as metaphysics i.e. conjecture, inference and abstraction. Knowledge has limits, and all existence has both knowable and unknowable aspects which are the inherent properties of them.
Quantifications on the objects will make the knowledge more objective, but not absolute or ultimate.
Quoting Astrophel
Oh. My bad. I took your some matter as a misprint, changed it to some manner. Concepts involved in some matter is rather ambiguous, wherein lay my justification for taking it upon myself to change it. Doesnt make much difference, though, really. The concepts involved in some matter or other are still found in the scope of Kants critique, as the a posteriori side of the synthesis of phenomenal representations in general. Concepts involved in matter being distinct from concepts contained in matter.
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Quoting Astrophel
The analytic/synthetic dichotomy only refers to the relations of subject/predicate conceptual content. Any thought, that is, any cognition by means of conceptions, is analytic if the conceptions in the subject relate in a certain way to the conceptions in the predicate, but synthetic if they do not.
Quoting Astrophel
Tree is a particular thing, of all possible things; thought of things in general is possible only under a universal conception, a category. Thought is not always of things, but may be of ideas or mere notions, for which no thing is cognizable as relating to it, in which case understanding has no need of the categories, and the idea is itself the universal, re: justice, beauty and the like. The categories belong to understanding and apply only to phenomena; the universals belong to pure reason alone and never apply to phenomena.
Quoting Astrophel
Thinking in a most particular way #1: A = A. Analytic judgement, a priori through identity;
Thinking in a most particular way #2: 1 + 1 = 2. Synthetic judgement, a priori through contradiction.
In talking of things in a most particular way describes experience, which is always grounded in synthetic judgements, yes.
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Quoting Astrophel
Ehhhh, so it might seem. But the words in the text say otherwise; see A12/B26. Cognition generally belongs to understanding, of which we are conscious; transcendental cognitions belong to pure reason, and of those we are not. Hence the higher level.
Not that thought doesnt have a structure. But one must decide as to whether the structure is represented by the subject/predicate propositional construct, which is the synthesis by productive imagination, or, the relation of units contained in those propositions to each other according to rules, which is logical inference, or, the origin of that which unites and regulates propositions within certain limits, which are principles as such.
But thought, in and of itself alone, in its empirical nature, is the act of referring a given intuition to an object by means of a conception. It is absurd to suppose we cannot have any such thought, nonetheless in and of itself alone, as doesnt have an intuition given from an object of the senses.
What of that thought represented by a single concept? We can certainly think round without that to which round is intuited. While it is true such singular concept is empty, insofar as it has no accompanying phenomenon, it is still a valid thought, hence can be legitimate content of a priori cognitions.
I might be inclined to accede to the idea that transcendental refers to the structure of thought of a certain mode, but less so as reference to the structure of thought in general. In general, transcendental refers to the structure of experience, in that by it certain kinds are either impossible, or merely illusory.
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Quoting Astrophel
True enough. Whats the problem? That were trapped in our own heads? Like .wishing we werent is enough to negate all the philosophy predicated on the necessity that we are? It makes much more sense, and is very far more productive, to organize the mechanisms were stuck with into an error-correcting method, than to pretend we can withdraw from them.
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Interesting perspective you got on this subject. We may not agree, but that doesnt make it less interesting.
I'm rather talking about the synthetic nature of a thought, what brings particulars under a heading just to think AT ALL. I say, That is a fence post! None of these terms in play are free of the universality of reference for all concepts are universals, no matter if one is speaking tautologically or synthetically. It is the very nature of speaking at all I refer to.
Quoting Mww
All particularity is lost with Kant. Calling it a particular thing is an employment of a string of concepts that have no dealings at all with whatever there is "before your waking eyes". Rationalism does this to the world. Justice? Beauty? What are these? Such is the world of representations merely: The understanding is essentially conceptual, all concepts are universals. Pure reason is just this, a philosophical construct in a world of representations. Think like Hegel does: a "particular" tree? But what is particularity if not this before me brought under a universal that subsumes all cases of the same kind? Justice and beauty are no different. Rationalist transcendental thinking never confronts the world at all.
The kingdom of ends? What is a kingdom to the understanding at the level Kant's epistemological analysis? A synthetic term. An end? The same. Pure reason?
Quoting Mww
Right, but Kant dismisses the content, the "material" of sensible knowledge in favor of the "science" of apriority. The rich content of the tree, its palpable phenomenal presence, has no place in knowledge, for as it is "as such," it is merely "blind". The transcendental aesthetic covers his concerns about a scientific handling of sensibility. Content is lost, and so, there is no being-a-tree in that thing there minus the presence of the reductive function of the understanding, reductive to mere form. Understanding for Kant is a matter of mere form through and through.
Quoting Mww
But what are the categories if not the essential structure of ALL that thought can think? Nothing escapes this. IF there is knowledge, THEN there is representation; so what is representation? It is essentially defined by what the understanding can say, speak, judge. Look out on a clear day at the horizon of things and what does Kant say that you "know" about anything? You know what the synthetic function of the understanding tells you. All else is blind. This is why his moral theory is so vacuous.
But this is a physicalist's view of things, yes? This kind of thinking is what makes the issue an issue, for it localizes the one, sensations, in an ontology, here, while putting the other, that tree, over there, thereby creating this distance. It is okay to speak of this distance in everyday talk, because it is useful to do so, not to forget the sciences that do this all the time. But philosophically, we pull away from common talk in an attempt to look more closely. When we are introduced to a world in infancy, the world out there is not something that has to be discursively determined. Rather, the moon and the rest are already there. No distance has to be crossed to make it so. So what makes this distance arise at all? It is the language in the "over there" and a "a mile that way" and all the talk about under, over, beneath, and so on, and it is in this language setting that distance comes to be. But these meanings have utility, not some authoritative original ontology. Originally, things had no epistemic distance at all. The moon was simply there, as it continues to be.
The distance came into existence in the utility and familiarity of language's spatial vocabulary, not in the primordiality of things fundamentally separated. Again, the trees, moon, hills and valleys are originally all simply there; the distance was closed before it even opened up. The way to close the distance is to reaffirm what was there at first, and then move from the obvious state that things are over there, outside of this, inside of that, and then ask, how is this possible? The tree is there, now how in the givenness of this clear fact do we give an account? Clearly, I am already connected.
Keep in mind that when you speak of a brain, it too is "immaterial which emerged from the brain." Weird as this sounds, this is what your thinking here is forcing one to say. You know, if one insists on talking about consciousness being a kind of epiphenomenon of a brain, one creates again and again the basis for this absurdity. Physicalist talk (or some derivative, modified version) will never make epistemology make any sense.
One has to drop physicalism, materialism, naturalism as an ontology. think of the world as an event in which there is an interface between consciousness and the world, only both are conceived IN the interface. Things are events and the moon and the perceptual act that meets it are really a singularity. Impossible to think of the one without the other, yet in the division that allows talk about "the one and the other" one is abstracting from an original whole.
Look at it like Rorty does: in his pragmatic, qualified naturalism, you are here, the moon is over there, two objects, and the one can never "get into" the other. Nonsense to think like this. But when I am sith my sister, if she not...well, there? Clearly not a brain event; I mean, my sister is NOT a brain event; she's right there in front of me.
My view is that BOTH must be accepted: She is not a brain event and she is not what she is independently of my perceiving her when I perceive her. This is the nly conclusion. But how can I be aware of something outside of brain events? Simple: they are not brain events. My brain is not a brain event! But when I witness my brain (in open brain surgery?), the imposition of the witnessing is, well, strongly constitutive of what I see as my brain. To make the move into how this constitution can be analyzed, one has to read the kind of philosophy that does just this, phenomenology.
Not all thought; thought determined from sensibility only, related to appearances. The categories do not have anything to do with pure a priori cognitions.
Quoting Astrophel
Nahhh .phenomena are representations, defined by the synthesis of matter and form, long before understanding exercises its logical function. We are not cognizant of phenomena, which is what you mean by saying they are blind, so ..
Quoting Astrophel
Ahhhh ..speaking. One can construct his thoughts without speaking, but he cannot speak without constructing his thoughts.
Why are we continuing this conversation, when you cant seem to find anything good about it?
Just out of curiosity, what is your answer to the thread title?
Problem with phenomenology is that it is another Kantian idealism without Thing-in-itself.
There seems to be three main theories of perception: Idealism, Direct Realism and Indirect Realism.
For the Direct Realist, i) the external world exists independently of the mind (hence, realism) ii) and we perceive the external world directly (hence, direct). For the Indirect Realist, i) the external world exists independently of the mind (hence, realism) but ii) we perceive the external world indirectly, via sense data (hence, indirect).
In a sense we all start off as Direct Realists. As you say, in the world of infancy, the world is not something that has to be discursively determined. For the child, there is no psychological distance between their immediate sensations and the object of their sensations
.
But later, language introduces us to spatial and temporal concepts, such as near and far, above and below, before and after. These concepts make us to look more closely at the world, and philosophically question more deeply their meaning.
Some then become Indirect Realists, conscious of a distance between our sensations and the object of these sensations. Some remain Direct Realists.
There is the question about the role of language in distancing the language user to their world.. As the Direct Realist directly perceives the world as it is, there is no distance between themselves and the world. As the Indirect Realist only indirectly perceives the world as it is, there is a distance between themselves and the world. As both the Direct and Indirect Realist use the same language, it does not seem that it is language that is opening up a distance between the observer and the world.
Quoting Mww
But pure apriori cognition is only conceived in thought. This is the point. The prison.
Quoting Mww
There is no representation long before the exercise of the understanding's logical function. That is impossible.
It is sensory intuitions that dare blind without concepts.
Quoting Mww
There is no interest here in the difference between talking, thinking, writing. In all of these we find the evidential basis for postulating underlying structure.
Quoting Mww
I sounded a bit negative because you started off being careless in how you put things across. So no choice on my part, really. I do think you got better. Also, philosophy is inherently negative, or critical, deconstructive. This is what it means to question at all.
Kranky asks, Quoting Kranky
Kranky needs to read Heidegger. When we speak of thoughts, senses, moods and general affectivity, and really anything at all, we are speaking (writing, thinking putting down in brail; really this is not the point. Not yet, that is), and so the issue lies not in the difference between the two, but in that which makes differences in the first place, and this is language, "the house of being," as Heidegger puts it. So when we talk about doubt, we need to look into what it means to doubt, and since this is philosophy, the incidental matters are suspended, you know, the details of this and that talked about in various ways in science, in everyday talk, so as to open up inquiry to the most basic assumptions. What is not suspended are these foundational issues that are not encountered in science, like epistemology, ontology, ethics, aesthetics. But you already know this.
So doubt. When we doubt the senses, we do because we can, so what makes doubt possible? At the most basic level, it is built into language itself, for language can doubt anything language has to say, and this because of the contingency of language, that is, anything that can be put into a proposition, is never some stand alone affirmation (conditionals are affirmations, as are negations, conjunctions, etc.), but has its meaning bound up in a world of already existing possibilities. When I see a cup on the table, it is not a cup until it is assimilated into a vast contextual historical understanding that comprises everything one has received from culture and language modelled by others. Here we discover what a cup IS. Doubt arises when language constructs a context for doubt, and this is possible for anything, thoughts, abstractions, the Taj Mahal, my love of Hagen dasz, simply because anything that can be said, can be doubted. And this the case because the meaning of these things is embedded meaning, and there are no such singularities in what language can say.
So thought and the senses can all be doubted. The trick for philosophy is to discover something that can affirmed that stands outside of language, but this discovery can only be "discovered" in language, a thesis, a proposition.
Well, that is a loaded statement, you know. There is so much philosophy in this, one barely knows where to begin. Kant wasn't wrong (though the Critique can be argued endlessly. Was Strawson right? Here and there, yes), but seriously incomplete; such is rationalism.
I strongly suspect you ground your philosophy in science. If I am wrong, then you can tell me so, but based on what you have said, even when you qualify your naturalism, it is this that rules your basic assumptions. The thing in itself, and idealism, these need to be dismissed at once. Not that they have no meaning, but that they entirely spoil the philosophy because they need context, and if there is no context, then there is nothing at all.
Rorty once said that one of his bottom line critiques centered around the idea that it was just impossible to see how anything out there in the world got in here, into a knowledge claim, a proposition that says such and such is the case. He was being a naturalist in this line of thinking, but his naturalism was not the ground level for him, pragmatism was.
So I would ask you, if you like, to ask Rorty's question of how things out there get in knowledge claims, just to begin showing the strength of phenomenology. It begins with the question of epistemology.
I am going to dismiss these. Not that they are not meaningful, but the approach that informs my thinking has no place for them (though after said approach is opened up, there may be room for this, but differently conceived).
Quoting RussellA
If the direct realist perceives the world as it is, I would ask, what do you mean by world? If the indirect realist knows the world indirectly, I would ask the same question.
It is a question of ontology. When one sees a world, what IS it one is seeing? Then, what is seeing, for this question is begged.
Realism doesn't make any sense until one has discovered what it means for something to be real. One might ask, is General Motors real? It IS a huge automobile manufacturing company, and we talk about it all the time, but we all know that some time in the company came into existence, and this was done in conversation, thematically grounded in business concepts, and these one time came into existence during historical dealings with economics. And when thinking like this sets in, one finds questions as to where language begins and what is real ends. I mean, it is not as if the matter is so clear, for ask about something like a tree of a cloud, and while you may have an object right in front of you, a palpable sensory imposition, the same language constructs that make General Motors what it is, make a tree what it IS, that is, historically, there were primitive relations to trees that expanded pragmatically, socially, descriptively, into these formal institutions of science and society.
No doubt, there is something there that is not language, don't get me wrong. But the "what is it?" philosophical question has to solve this matter of what is "there" and what makes it what it IS. Traditional talk about primary and secondary qualities, making the tree what it is as something in time and space is still.....talk.
Language does stand for the world, but "stands in" for the world, as Derrida put it.
Conceived in thought. I dont know what that means. There are so many forms of pure a priori cognitions, or so many dissimilar applications of them, I wouldnt be so ready to call out their conditions. But generally, pure a priori cognitions belongs to reason, which eliminates them from the spontaneity of conceptions, hence conceived in thought, which belong to understanding.
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Quoting Astrophel
Actually it isnt, given the tenets of this particular metaphysic. Conceptions alone constitute the representations of understanding, from which it thinks, and of course, as we all know .or should know .understanding cannot intuit and intuition cannot think.
Phenomenon is the undetermined object of intuition**, which makes explicit no conception is as yet thought as belonging to it. It is merely the matter of sensation given a posteriori, synthesized with the some relevant form residing a priori in the subject himself. To say it is blind is merely a euphemism indicating nothing can be done with representations in this condition, until understanding gets its grubby paws on it and does its rule-bound logical thing. It thinking thing, donchaknow, by which conceptions are connected to that phenomenon, the condition for a possible objective, that is, empirical, cognition.
(**depending on translator; some call it appearance. Either way, the salient point is, undetermined)
Quoting Astrophel
The underlaying structure determines how the differences manifest. It is absurd to suppose, given the biological structural congruency of all humans in general, that there resides manifestly different underlying intellectual structure, simply given the invention of different words representing common things.
Your interest may lay anywhere you like, but mine is centered exclusively on the structure of thinking, from which all else follows in accordance with its structure, including the names by which I represent to myself its collective entities and functions.
Which leads me to this: what is you opinion on the presence of, or the validity in conditioning the human cognitive system on, imagery?
It means that when one asks basic questions about the world, one cannot escape the delimitations of representation. All the understanding can ever affirm lies with his rationalist finitude, an ontology of the formal structure of language only. Inquiry can never penetrate beyond this impossible wall into this impossible actuality of things-in-themselves. These are propositional delimitations, and so whatever is said at all must be found to exhibit this categorical adherence, and this exhausts the understanding. To conceive of pure apriority is to conceive with just these apriori structures in place, in other words, the Critique of Pure Reason dos not escape the finitude of logical possiblities. Logic SHOWS us apriority, but when we speak of what it IS we are necessarily bound to the medium of language's meaning possiblities, the categories. So when Kant says something like, "What must first be given with a view to the a priori knowledge of all objects is the manifold of pure intuition," this sentential construction is itself bound to the categories.
The "pure" categories are entirely metaphysical postulations. But they cannot be warranted because they can only be derivative of what is IN phenomenological possiblities.
Quoting Mww
It is a confusing way he puts it. Phenomenology, of which Kant is the, well, grandfather, takes the phenomenon to be the whole that comprises all that in makes appearance possible (unless you want to talk about deviations for this, which is not what this here is about). Something does not appear unless it is understood. The color red does not appear to a newly born; only blooming and buzzing. If Kant wants to call the phenomenon as the material equivalent of sensory intuitions, then fine.
Quoting Mww
Those thoughts I had about Kranky's OP didn't register, eh?
Conditioning the human cognitive system? Historicity and time.
There are thoughts, language and the world, and there is the question as to how these relate.
The three theories of perception, Idealism, Direct Realism and Indirect Realism are primarily interested in the relation between thought and the world, though of course language is needed to express their different epistemological positions. What we do know for certain are our thoughts and sensations.
I cannot answer for the Direct Realist who knows that they directly perceive the world as it is through their sensations, as I don't agree with them.
As an Indirect Realist, I believe that there is a world independent of my observing it that has caused my sensations. I can never know, but I believe that there is, because it a satisfactory explanation for the sensations that I experience. What is real is a mystery, a world of things-in-themselves. I believe a real world exists, but only because this is the most satisfactory explanation.
As regards thought, the phenomenological approach makes sense. In part by removing the Cartesian separation between the mind and the mind-independent and in part by removing the problem of the unknowable thing-in-itself. Phenomenology attempts to create the conditions for the objective study of what is usually regarded as subjective, our judgements, perceptions and emotions of our conscious experienced sensations. Phenomenology rejects both Rationalism and Empiricism in favour of the person's lived experiences.
As regards language, linguistic idealism makes sense. Language is not contingent on the world, but rather language underpins the world that we know. It is not the case that there are objects in the world that are nameable within language, but rather the objects in our world exist because they are named in the language that we use to describe them. An object being named can only exist within its context as a logical semantic part of the sentence it is within. As you say, language does stand for the world, but also "stands in" for the world. When Derrida wrote "there is nothing outside the text" some have interpreted this as linguistic idealism, which denies the existence of a real-world outside language. Wittgenstein as well said that he had come to believe that thoughts and language were two aspects of the same thing, in that we can only think using language.
We don't know for certain how thoughts, language and the world relate, but for me, a combination of Indirect Realism, Phenomenology and Linguistic Idealism seems to be a sensible combination.
My ideas seem to be based on natural logic rather than science. I don't deny science, but always be aware of the limitations of science. But yes, I do like pragmatism and intend to read Dewey, James, Pierce, Whitehead, and Strawson too.
How do we have knowledge? I feel idealism and materialism and realism all have their points. But they all seem to have limitations too. Phenomenology seems interesting, but it too, seems to be only emphasising on the experience side of perception and knowledge, while mentioning the significance of body, consciousness and intentionality, they don't seem to go deeper into those areas. I could be wrong here. I must admit I hadn't read a lot on phenomenology, and my idea on it is purely from guessing.
It is definitely correct that our senses feed us with the external world as a phenomenon i.e. appearance, but there is more than just phenomenon and appearance in the world. There are actual facts, matters, objects and changes. Kant was definitely correct in saying that there is the boundary of our senses, and out of the boundary there is the world of the unknown.
But knowledge is far more than just sense perception. We apply our thoughts, logic and reasoning on the contents of perception in order to build knowledge. Some knowledge becomes the foundation for further inference and reasoning other knowledge, hence knowledge keeps expanding.
We know that science, math, logic and language are the tools for describing, verifying and expanding our knowledge.
But going back to OP, our most foundational criteria for knowledge is sense perception. We only doubt sense perception when there is discrepancies in the perception which doesn't make sense due to possible illusion or mistake on the perception. So, the OP's premise that we tend to doubt sense perception in most cases is incorrect. Our contents of thought have more chance of going wrong due to the folks' faulty reasoning or mixing the thought process with their personal irrational emotion. Hence we often see folks making false claims and statements on others ideas, and also making bad decisions on their own affairs too.
Quoting Astrophel
I have not read Rorty, hence I cannot comment on his philosophy at this point. I owned a book by Rorty titled "Mirror of Nature???", and read a few pages. But the book has gone missing, and cannot be located. Will try reading it again if and when I find the book. From my memory Rorty was mentioning a lot of Heidegger.
Quoting RussellA
Sorry to be a noodge, but not subjective. Continental philosophy doesn't really take up issues in terms of subjective vs objective (though these terms will show up), realism, direct of otherwise, nor is idealism a term used, because terms like this set up a structure of inquiry that is misleading and lacking what is needed for purging from philosophy a lot of bad metaphysics that makes philosophy so resistant to understanding. What is real? is going to be determined in primordiality of the world, what is "there," and a term like realism and its variations, uses as its basic assumption something that is prior to this givenness, an assumption going into first thoughts about what is to be achieved, a kind of assumed Archimedean place where thought first digs in and wields in arguments, then ends up struggling in essentially the same old ways simply because basic thinking is so stubborn. One cannot start with a concept like realism because the sense of the term has yet to be established. I underline this because it is central to the phenomenological approach. All there is, is what is given, and the real is to be determined only from this. Putting it bluntly, idealism, saying all there is is idea, plays against realism, saying all there is is something independent of idea, is a dichotomy that creates two polar opposites that cannot be reconciled, and as long as one thinks like this, one is bound to some sort of compromise, some "in between" thinking that tries to explain things, again, all along knowing full well that this cannot happen, not really, with these concepts foundationally in place.
Phenomenology really can't be put in this context of thought, but it generally is for a pretty simple reason: most of what people read over here is anglo american analytic philosophy, typically grounded in some form of naturalism and science that makes the stage for thoughtful events. And phenomenology is SO alien these this assumption, and, of course, difficult to penetrate due to this.
Reading Being and Time is a revolution, turns familiar thinking up side down and if one has a real desire to understand the world, and not just arguments (analytic thought is like this, a reduction of philososphy to language games, which is what you get when you put the fate of philosophy in the hands of a logician like Bertrand Russell. Of course, Kant was a logician, too, and the former thought the latter fantasist, but note how empty Kant is, as if understanding the world could be fit into a strictly formal analytic) one has to read it.
Of course, most that do this find it dense and weird, and it is. But this is the idea, really: he had to remove philosophy from assumptions that literally created division where there is none, so it is necessary take up an essentially descriptive vocabulary, putting aside this other vocabulary that was inventing problems. The world is not divided ontologically into any parts, things over there, thoughts and feeling here, and there is no epistemic distance between me and this tree at all. There never was!
That phenomena must meet the criteria of the categories doesnt exhaust understanding, it enables the manifold of conceptions understanding possesses to be synthesized in the construction of a judgement on the one hand, or, enables an appeal to experience in the case of repetitive perception on the other.
In order for the affect of the thing on the senses, and the representation of that thing as it is understood, be sufficiently congruent to be knowledge of the thing, there must be rules by which one relates to the other, and, that by which the conceptions annexed to the phenomenon relate to each other. Something must have already prohibited the conception round from being imagined as belonging to the conception tall, when the thing perceived ended up being cognized initially, or remembered as post hoc experience, as a dinner plate.
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Quoting Astrophel
Whatever is said of gods and tooth fairies is possible without reference to phenomena representing an object cognized as belonging to those conceptions, such object being all that requires exhibition of categorical adherence.
The pure conceptions of the understanding are transcendental deductions of reason. Understanding uses them, but they are not given from understanding itself. These in opposition to conceptions arising spontaneously within understanding itself, in response to the influx of intuited representations. Pure conceptions condition sensibility, empirical conceptions condition thinking.
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Quoting Astrophel
Kant wouldnt say something like that, for knowledge of all objects is always empirical, and what must first be given is the object itself, insofar as it appears to sensibility. That which is representation must first be perception.
You more than likely meant to say, what must be given with a view of knowledge of all objects is the manifold of pure intuition a priori. Or even, what must be given a priori with a view to knowledge of all objects, is the manifold of pure intuition.
As for the sentential construction being bound to the categories, considering this proposition is a tenet in speculative metaphysics, for which there is no empirical proofs for its objects derived from experience, the categories are not involved, from which follows the construct is not bound by them. Every object of theoretical speculation is transcendental; there are no faculties of human intelligence in concreto.
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Quoting Astrophel
What is IN phenomenological possibility? I dont recognize phenomenological possibility, and I certainly have no idea what is IN possibilities. Nothing is IN a possibility, it is never schema but has schemata under it, re: the schema of possibility is determination of a representation in any time. Common-speak being that thing that doesnt appear to me is no possible experience for me.
In things that are possible is not the same as what is in possibilities. I mean .what sense does it make to ask if a thing has possibility, when all we want to know is if the thing is possible. The former presupposes the thing being asked about, which proves it must be a possible thing.
Which reduces the whole mess to the notion that categories can never be predicates, but only subjects, in logical propositional constructs, and as such, derivatives of what is IN possibilities becomes unintelligible.
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Quoting Astrophel
If thats the case, his successors treat it as the proverbial red-headed stepchild, to which Kant would have vehemently objected. Ripped the concept of phenomena right outta its old-fashioned sandbox, consigned it to a post-modern tarpit.
Quoting Astrophel
So that which is not understood never appears? Guys walking down the street, hears a loud bang from around the corner. An appearance to his ears, manifesting as a sensation of sound is immediately given, without him immediately understanding the cause of it.
Something does not appear iff there is no effect on the senses. If there is an effect, if the senses are affected, there is necessarily an appearance. Full stop. There is no cognitive power in mere perception, therefore any cognitive function is irrelevant with respect to it. On the other hand, something does not become cognized until it is understood.
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Quoting Astrophel
You mean this?
Quoting Astrophel
Fine. Doubt abounds. Whats that got to do with imagery?
What you specify as a trick of philosophy, is nothing but some arbitrary, indiscriminate iteration of human intelligence bringing itself to the fore. Different human, different iteration, different form of the same intelligence. Another one might say the duty of philosophy is to discover apodeitically that by which such intelligence manifests, but for which language has no relevance except for expressions of such discoveries.
And the beat goes on ..
I can understand Phenomenology as part of a personal philosophy, but it seems limited if it made up the whole of a personal philosophy.
Phenomenology rejects rationalism and empiricism in favour of a person's "lived experience", relying on an intuitive grasp of knowledge free from any philosophical intellectualising.
For example, in Bracketing, one withholds any conscious opinion of what is perceived, taking no position as to the reality of what is seen, but simply to witness it as it presents itself.
I agree that Phenomenology can be insightful in our understanding about the relation of the mind to the sensations it experiences, but it seems insufficient not to question these sensations and only witness them.
Philosophy must surely be about questioning, not simply about phenomenologically accepting.
Key Ideas in Phenomenology by Marc Applebaum, 2012
How about liberating inquiry from a lot of bad thinking that manufactures problems? Phenomenology is not subjective; it is talked about like that because phenomenology allows for these "subjective" matters to be taken up philosophically rather than being dismissed as irrelevant. And so when Heidegger talks about moods (attunements), he is simply allowing for the event of a perception to be what it is rather than dismissing the perceptual end of this entirely. Imagine thinking of a perceptual event excluding perception altogether! When one encounters something, someone, there is IN the interface an interest, a caring, and the like, and in the encounter, there is recollection and anticipation, and predelineated ideas in place, and certainly not simpy an acknowledgement of what is there as a "stand alone" entity. Why does phenomenology talk about such things? Because this is what constitutes an encounter with the world. Talk about what is outside of this is just bad metaphysics.
Look at it like Rorty does, from a naturalist's pov (keeping in mind he is only a naturalist because he thinks this is the only wheel that rolls and not because he abides by the naturalist's metaphysics): I am here, and in this being here I have these events, and across the street there are things that are just what they are. All that is out there, those things, people, appear here, in this entity I call me and they never enter my locality any more than the street lamp enters the fire hydrant. That's physicalism, yes? And just as the reflection of the hydrant may appear on a sunny day in the metallic surface of the lamp's steel body, but the lamp itself not move an inch, these things I see never enter me, but I "see" them in me as physical aspects of my own existence, but this seeing is not representational, because to have representation you have to have some clear idea about what is being represented apart from the represntation and this is never forthcoming. One can't have a representation of Y in representation X, if one never encounters Y at all. This seeing, thatis IN this physicalist account, in a human brain is absolutely most emphatically nothing at all even remotely like the lamp, and this makes talk about the lamp outside of this physical feature of myself of my own existence impossible! Rorty is stubborn on this point, and there is a feud between Rorty and Putnam such that the latter mocks Rorty for saying he never actually encounters his own wife! Putnam's position is crystal clear, but is it stronger that Rorty's? I mean, how do even begin to deny that his wife is there? But Rorty's pragmatism just calls it like it is: brain events are not lamps, clouds or other people.
This is where talk about physicalism, naturalism gets one, in an impossible epistemology. What happens in phenomenology is that this epistemic distance has no status, because the lamp post, the fir hydrant, are there, just as they appear to be, and the approach to acknwowledging their existence (their being "really there") never goes beyond this. Things we observe are not actually something else being represented; rather, they are what they are.
One has never witnessed anything that is not a phenomenon.
The point is more simple. We know how this goes. It's just that when one pulls back and realizes where Kant's ontology takes one, it is realized that the entire enterprise is an abstraction of our existence and the world, not something that is even looking for apodicticity in existence. Kant's greatness lies in attention to ordinary judgment in common experience, not in far flung metaphysics. But his conclusion are literally vacuous. Of course, he also didnt realize the nature of language in which this formal analysis is finds its theme, logic.
If you and I were principally agencies of logic, synthesizing and analyzing the data afforded by the senses, then Kant would have nailed the human condition. But such an idea is absurd.
Quoting Mww
You mean they are deduced, not that they are deductions. Understanding doesn't "use" them. They are of the structure of the understanding itself. I don't know what you're talking about here.
Quoting Mww
What he means by "first" is presupposed by the possibility of aprioity. There must be a manifold of pure intuition to account for the structure of knowledge of objects. Kant's is an extrapolation from what is the case, to what has to be the case to explain this. The manifold must be the case given the way ordinary judgments are put together. This is fundamental to the whole Critique.
It's a quote.
Quoting Mww
The categories are ALWAYS involved. As I write and think. There is no escaping categorical placement. If this isn't making sense, just consider what symbolic logic is. There is NO proposition that escapes logical form. When you awaken, notice a world around you, you are already "in" Kantian categories as the logic of affirmations seize upon intuitions.
No faculties in concreto? What does this even begin to mean in Kantian thinking?
Quoting Mww
No, possiblility here refers to what is necessary for something to be possible at all.
Quoting Mww
The matter goes to what must be the case for something that is there before you to be what it is. If I have judgments that are, say, negations, and there is nothing in empirical perceptions explains what a negation is, then I have appeal the form itself, and an explanation for this lies in the nature of the possiblity of logicality, and this lies in out of transcendentally out of reach.
Quoting Mww
This is not about that. The discussion here is about deriving the categories in the first place, that is, the ground for their postulation. But on the other hand, keep in mind that when we talk about a category, this itself will be done ALSO within the presuppositional ground of speaking at all, and then, when language deals with these presuppositions, the categories' own structures are necessarily in place. Categories "themselves" are transcendental, and cannot be spoken, so when they are spoken "about", the speaking is subject to their own manifest rules.
Possibilities here should be understood in light of statements like this: "If, therefore, we seek to discover how pure concepts of understanding are possible, we must enquire what are the a priori conditions upon which the possibility of experience rests"--- from what is given to what must be the case to make this possible. This is the nature of an apriori argument. The whole argument of the deduction in an extrapolation.
Quoting Mww
Would Kant have approved of Husserl or Heidegger; or Kierkegaard? Of course not. But such things never occurred to him. I can't imagine what he would think reading Derrida. He would have to rad Heidegger, first. It would take a radical leap of philosophical imagination. But so what. Kant laid the foundation for just this kind of development. No Kant, no phenomenology. Therein lies his greatness. Not in the sustainability of all he said.
Tarpit is puzzling. Who do you have in mind, and what is calling this a tarpit about? Or perhaps you're just throwing out frustrations with difficult reading. I find this usually to be the case.
Quoting Mww
This sounds naive. Understanding is not about explicit analysis. Read Husserl for this, his Ideas I, but this doesn't mean he is right an all accounts, but here, given that we are agenies of language awareness, there is this awareness implicit in the conscious events of our lives, even in the most immediate ones. So when the loud bang is heard, the familiarity of loud bangs makes the alarming matter meaningful, not alien to the understanding. And while one could say the same for cows and goats regarding the pre established familiarity, it is us whose pragmatic affairs are grasped in language and its logic, and thus, Kantian categories are 'in" the recognition.
If a newly born were to hear the loud noise, she would clearly react, register the event, but it would not be a loud noise. It would not BE anything. It would be, as Kant would put it, blind intuition, and this, it must be stated with emphasis, is not thinkable. It is transcendental.
This is not Kant talking here. Note how I have here and there criticized the thinking in the Critique for conceiving the world in a vacuum of meaningless form, I do this because the true philosophical ground for the ansalysis of what and who we are lies in this dimension of our transcendence, which he mostly ignores. Granted, it is a critique of logical purity he aims for, but then, this is my point. A person is not, clearly, reducible to what the Critique has to say. But Kant opens the door for just this discussion.
Quoting Mww
But note that when you say "iff there is no eeffect on the senses" you are saying this, and in this you comply with Kant's own insistence on stepping out of mere "blindness". Without language context, for us, that is, and not the animal, it is not as if there is nothing there, but it makes no appearance AS something. Even if you speak of a "pure phenomenon" this never occurs to us outside of, if you will, the purity of the language that grasps it, implicitly of otherwise. What this means is hard to say ourside of the literature.
Quoting Mww
Or the beat actually pauses where things are getting close. Where can one settle doubt? Forget the categories as some impossible things in themselves. This is metaphysics, or, misleading metaphysics or metaphysics that draws a hard line, and such lines can never be drawn in any meaningful way because, as Wittgenstein put it, that would require an understanding of what is on both sides of the line, and clearly, the categories cannot be understood.
Lety's say Kant was right, and the magic of metaphysics lies with apodicticity. so when we witness a stone, and realize the stone cannot move by itself by necessity, it is the necessity that grounds causality in the truly Real, why? Because necessity by definition cannot be gainsaid. But then,we know that it CAN be gainsaid. Logic can be gainsaid? Of course, since logic is given to us in language, and language is historically conceived, so even when on calls something apodictic, it is a calling, a taking something "as" something in language, and this brings the contingency of language down upon what is said. Sure, I can't imagine a thing self moving, but what this IS in itself is utterly transcendental, yes, even calling it transcendental is bound to this contingency. This is roughly Derrida.
So talk about how intelligence manifests presupposes the language that speaks about intelligence. This does what Kant does, takes thought to its own presuppositions, but makes the important steps forward. The "trick" is to see that when Language takes one to this final confrontation, the matter of language encountering language, as when one says, "what am I?" (see, for a more dramatic unfolding of this, Beckett's Molloy or Blancho's Thomas the Obscure), it finds liberation from, not Kant's categories, but from the illusory assumption that this bottom itself IS a language construction. Language "brings" one to the world, the radical "other" of a world.
You are asking a question that is taken up as a major theme in Heidegger. What the nature of questioning? But also, your thoughts on the exclusivity of the "lived experience" need to be addressed, and obviously I can't convince you that reading Heidegger's Being and TIme would be the most important philosophical experience of your life just by saying so. And the arguments are just so involved.
So all I can really do is mention why it is important.
Too much to say, but at the basic level one thing stands head and shoulders above others: all that one ever has observed, or can observe, is phenomena. Kant's thing-in-itself is derivative of phenomena, so whatever Kant hd in mind with thing-in-itself had to have been derivative of what is, simply put, there, in what is given. When one discovers apriority in necessity, from whence comes this? and the transcendental ground itself, and this is very important as I see it, this ground itself and the term 'transcendental" must be discoverable in the structure of what is given, and the idea of the beyond, the metaphysical, this, too, is IN the immanent. The only conclusion: immanence IS transcendental. So when I look at my wife, and see her there, she is BOTH there in all the usual ways, AND she is utterly transcendental, for the language that is IN my understanding of her being who she is in foundationally indeterminate.
There is no line drawn anywhere except that line which is conceived in the liberties of language's openness. Language can conceive of a great deal of things, pragmatic and useful, cultural and institutional (weddings, funerals, e.g., are institutions of culture), theoretical, and so on, so put this all down (see Husserl's epoche) and allow the world to declare itself in a kind of Yielding (gelasenheit. See Heidegger's Conversation on a Country Path about Thinking in his Discourse of Thinking) or listening or meditative thnking. Only here can one discover what all the fuss is about. One has to suspend or "bracket" all that makes the world familiar, in order to "see" this hidden world that is entirely "other" than what familiarity says it is.
Takes practice. The phenomenological reduction (epoche) is a "method" of discovery, not merely a theory. It will not fit into science. Science "fits into" the reduction, so to speak, for the reduction is foundational. For Heidegger this means equiprimordial, meaning there is only the frontier of language's openness. From here is gets complicated. See, e.g., What is Metaphysics?
I cannot really respond as I have limited knowledge of Husserl, Heidegger and Existentialism in general.
However, in my agreement with Linguistic Idealism, I have sympathy with the notion in Husserl's Being and Time that the human is not a subjective spectator of objects, but rather that subject and object are inseparable. In my case, linked within language.
I don't know the background to Existentialism, have not read Kierkegaard and have only limited exposure to Nietzsche. However, I naturally agree with any critique of rationalism, and am supportive of their interest in the problem of meaning.
I have spent more time on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, respecting his attempt to understand the limits and scope of metaphysics, as well as investigating how reason may be used to gain knowledge about the world.
As regards Husserl's Logical Investigations, for me there is promise in Brentano's concept of Intentionality and the problem of intentional inexistence, the investigation of the relation between the act of consciousness and the phenomena at which it is directed. I tend more to agree more with the "bracketing" of assumptions about the existence of an external world than the Direct Realist who believes that they directly know the external world.
Continental philosophy opens up a whole new field of understanding.
CPR doesnt treat of empirical ontology; it is a purely epistemological thesis, from a metaphysical perspective.
Quoting Astrophel
What ..not a fan of freedom as sufficient cause?
Quoting Astrophel
91 pages on sensibility, just under 400 pages on logic, all integral to the human condition. Fine if you wish to deny we are agents of logic, but Im happily convinced human agency is necessarily predicated on it.
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Quoting Astrophel
Nope. Extrapolation from what is the case for us, to how the case is to be known by us. We understand the world; we explain the understanding. Language for the second, not for the first.
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Quoting Astrophel
Nope. What he means by first here, is merely that occassion given to a theoretical systemic procedure. There happens to be a particular theoretical system which presupposes a priori conditions, turning sensation into representation according to pure intuitions and productive imagination.
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Quoting Astrophel
When I write and think, about my notice of the world. While it may that the categories are always involved when I write, it being a phenomenal exercise, it is not the case for when I think, for it is possible that I think in pure a priori terms, that is, non-empirical, for which the categories are not involved. The logic of my a priori judgements still requires affirmation, at least to be productive, but there is no occassion to seize upon intuition.
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Quoting Astrophel
I need not go beyond relations in time, to discover what is necessary for something to be possible, as I already mentioned. For something to be possible at all its representation must be determinable in any time. Necessity: determinable in all time; existence: determinable in a time.
Quoting Astrophel
Agreed, which justifies the claim there is no language in pure thought.
Quoting Astrophel
Correct, from which follows the rules for speaking are very far from the rules for transcendental deduction.
Quoting Astrophel
Wait ..so all youre talking about is justifying the origin of the categories, while Im talking about justifying the use of them? What is necessary for the possibility of things makes little sense to me, but what is the ground for the possibility of transcendental deduction of the categories, is a whole nuther ball of wax.
Dunno where your quote comes from, but in A88/B120 in Kemp Smith is shown that is precisely how the deduction is NOT served.
. they make affirmations concerning objects not by means of the predicates of intuition and sensibility, but of pure thought à priori ..
Your a priori conditions upon which the possibility of experience rests, are precisely those very intuitions my quote denotes as not by means of.
Quoting Astrophel
Nope. This is the nature of a transcendental argument, which is a priori. But not all a priori arguments are transcendental, re: those of understanding in its categorical judgements. Transcendental arguments originate in, and are the exclusive purview of, pure reason alone.
Page one.
Quoting Astrophel
Po-TA-toe, po-TAH-toe. Anything deduced is a deduction. They are deduced transcendentally by pure reason; they are transcendental deductions of pure reason.
. Thus, the same understanding, and by the same operations, whereby in conceptions, by means of analytical unity, it produced the logical form of a judgement, introduces, by means of the synthetical unity of the manifold in intuition, a transcendental content into its representations, on which account they are called pure conceptions of the understanding, and they apply à priori to objects .
(A79/B105. So the categories, the pure conceptions of the understanding, are used by it. Used by still is not origin of, worth keeping in mind)
As to the structure of the understanding itself .that is a very tall order. I submit that all the understanding does, all the constituents of its function, reduce to what can be called the transcendental unity of self-consciousness.
(Nobody said this was gonna be easy. Or, necessarily the case. But logically coherent nonetheless, hence at least theoretically reasonable)
Quoting Astrophel
Thats in fact all understanding is about. It is the analysis of all that contained in the primitive representation I think.
. And thus the synthetical unity of apperception is the highest point with which we must connect every operation of the understanding, even the whole of logic, and after it our transcendental philosophy; indeed, this faculty is the understanding itself.
Thus it is that the function of understanding is distinct from that to which it directs itself when it thinks, or, when the subject exercises his innate capacity for thinking. To understand, on the other hand, presupposes the completion of that analysis, the affirmation or negation of constructed judgements relative to empirical conditions, not yet verified by experience.
All without a single solitary word, either expressed, or merely thought.
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Quoting Astrophel
This is in part contradictory. To react, to register an event, makes explicit something being sufficient causality for such reaction to even obtain. It may not register as a loud noise, insofar as this describes a judgement of relative quality conjoined with a specific mode of intuition, which an infant would not possess the rational ability to construct, but it would still be something for him.
Arent babies given hearing tests, to discover whether their ears work, rather than the brain? Be funny as hell .give a baby a hearing test, then ask him what he thinks he heard.
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Quoting Astrophel
And I reject that criticism, in that the thinking in CPR resolves the illusion of conceiving the world in any way except as the form of all that is relatable to it, hence hardly meaningless. We perceive things in a world; we dont perceive worlds. From which follows world is conceivable only as the form of that in which all things are contained, but is not itself contained by it.
Quoting Astrophel
He ignores it in CPR because the analysis of who or what we are is properly the concern of his moral philosophy, which is not transcendental.
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Quoting Astrophel
The name given to it presupposes the grasp of the conception to which the name relates. Its occurence in thought, its conceivability, is explicitly the very purity by which the language describing it, is even possible. Language doesnt grasp, it merely represents whats already been grasped.
The purity of language is in thought; the purity of thought is in logic; the purity of logic is in pure reason; the purity of pure reason is the irreducible human condition.
Well, you sound like someone who just might do the work required to understand these people. So often the initial interest is killed by the alien nature of what is being said and the hard work of assimilating the ideas and the jargon. Those who want to think as if nothing really important is going on in philosophy head towards anglo american philosophy which tries to reduce its thematic possiblities to ordinary talk, which is why they rely on science for their bottom line, and this way is nothing but disaster at the level of basic questions. When you try to simply eliminate metaphysics in the willful act of ignoring it, you end up with the trivial tail end of science. And really much worse: Science, as a philosophical ontology/epistemology goes absolutely nowhere, quite literally. And science doesn't even begin, again, literally, to talk about the most salient feature of your existence, ethics/aesthetics.
Two kinds of philosophers, the anglo american analytic above, and the continental. This latter is usually ignored by the former, certainly due in part to the reluctance to learn any German, French or Greek, in part. A competent paper in Heidegger has to deal, at least in part, with the way German handles ideas because Heidegger is making a bold move to use language in a way that defies tradition, and he does this by endless neologizing The German. He wants to eradicate metaphysics, just as the analytics do, but then, Heidegger, and this is one thing that makes him a deeply profound thinker, recasts metaphysics in finitude! He is just extraordinary, for he realizes that metaphysics is grounded in the essential givenness of the world, and that Kant was right: Philosophy must be rid of centuries of bad Christian metaphysics; THOUGH, I would add, after Heidegger, there is a group of neoHusserlians in post-post modern French theology that take Heidegger;s "exposition of the human soul" if you will, into a finitude that is subsumed by infinity! See Emanuel Levinas, Michel Henry, Jean Luc Marion, et al. Heidegger is huge door that opens up into extraordinary insight. There are also a slew of Catholic Heideggerian, rather than Thomist, as they have always been, theologists like Von Hildebrandt, Karl Rahner, who explain Christian metaphysics through Being and Time's basic thinking.
Anyway, so good to hear that someone wants to do this "authentic" work in philosophy, rather than the pointless Anglo american thinking. Not that it is a completely worthless. Quine is helpful for balance, and even someone like Daniel Dennett can be helpful, showing what really rigorous thinking comes to when science rules basic ideas. But then, he REALLY does understanding the world at all. And he's not trying to. He just wants arguments to work, and this I define as the basic drive on that sid e of philosophy. They just look at arguments and construct truth table style coherence. Such thinking about truth is propositional and logical, which is fine. But contrast this to Heidegger's alethea! This is the world! This is our existence!
NO. Ontology and epistemology are two sides to the same existence. Causality, e.g., IS IN the existence of this desk in the logic of sensory intuitions being blind by themselves. What you acknowledge to BE a lamp is a synthesis.
Quoting Mww
You would have to explain your thinking here.
Quoting Mww
And what do you think Kant is saying about human agency?
Quoting Mww
Extrapolation is the move from what IS the case to what must be the case to account for this. What is the case is is judgment. What must be the case given the way judgment is structured is pure reason, loosely put. This is basic. Logic is apriori, and Kant's arguments are apriori. But all things are first evidenced in the "world" and and here is where judgments appear. No manifestation in phenomena, then no ground for apriori argument.
Quoting Mww
I wrote this: ""So when Kant says something like, "What must first be given with a view to the a priori knowledge of all objects is the manifold of pure intuition," this sentential construction is itself bound to the categories."
Obviously this is true since all sentential constructions are so bound. "First" here refers to what is logically first, or presupposed, as when reading this sentence there is a logical structure presupposed in the understanding of its meaning. Logical presupposedness is what the Critique is all about, this digging deep into what must be the case IN the presuppositional underpinning of everyday speaking.
Quoting Mww
How does the thought you may have about logic, or better, when, say, when you are actually doing symbolic logic, escape the very rigor that is at work in your thinking? How can any thought at all be outside of logicality?
Quoting Mww
There is no issue here. The reference is to what is logically possible. Simply that. It is logically not possible for an object to be two different colors at once or for an object to be at two different velocities at once.
Quoting Mww
No language in pure thought? But what is Kant "talking" about? "Pure thought" is simply a language construct that Kant uses to talk "about" things that cannot be talked about. Clearly, one has to "talk" to conceive of pure thought at all, so the issue arises: Can one meaningfully talk about something that stands outside of talk? and it is Kant's own transcendental Dialectic that weighs down on this. In the end, he is just as bad as Descartes.
Quoting Mww
I don't see any sense in this at all. The rules are rigorous everywhere. They do not vary. I say, If you go out today, you should bring an umbrella, this has the logically essential structure of a conditional proposition. In everyday talk, of course, it is entangled in many affairs, but the logic is unwavering, and can be reduced to its basic structure in symbolic and then, predicate logic. It is IN tthe rules for speaking that logic is discovered in the first place.
Quoting Mww
The categories have no use. They are theoretical postulates. No one can ever "see" such a thing, nor use it. The evidential basis for any discussion about it lies in exclusively in language and its logical features (which is, well, the absolute WORST kind of question begging, as these features which are being talked about are IN the structure of talking itself, and are assumed to be what they "are". Of course, he understood this; see the quote below. But in declaring an end to metaphysics, one has to draw a line, and he drew one, and this is impossible! He does this grudgingly! This is why Wittgenstein had to refer to it as nonsense, even as he talked about it, saying essentially, in the Tractatus, "what I am saying is nonsense."
Here is a quote from A 96, a good one:
[i]Pure a priori concepts, if such exist, cannot indeed contain anything empirical; yet, none the less, they can serve solely as a priori conditions of a possible experience. Upon this ground alone can their objective reality rest. If, therefore, we seek to discover how pure concepts of understanding are possible, we must enquire what are the a priori conditions upon which the possibility of experience A 96
rests, and which remain as its underlying grounds when everything empirical is abstracted from appearances.[/i]
See, this is the way He says it, not me. "If such exist" is very important, for it is experience and its qpriori structure that warrants the Critique. The pure concepts are an abstraction, a mere postulation, noumenal and remote.
"Not be means of" is a quibble based on misunderstanding only.
Quoting Mww
Extrapolation is the logical move from what is taken as an assumption to what this presupposes. This is what "Upon this ground alone can their objective reality rest," in the above is saying. "This ground alone" refers to experience and the logical structure exhibited in judgment. A transcendental argument is nothing but extrapolation--one begins with what is there, and one infers from t his to what must be the case. All extrapolation is essentially logical, an inference from what is known to what is not known.
But this is the tricky part, isn't it: A deductive argument that is not like modus ponens, where the conclusion is discovered in the premises. Rather, here, in this transcendental argument, the conclusion is impossible to conceive! And so the conclusion is clearly NOT exhaustively possessed in the premises, or even possessed at all in them. So can it be properly called a deduction at all? Well, it can if you call it a transcendental deduction, but then, the issue turns to the premises and the warrant. SINCE the conclusion is indeterminate, the logic of the Critique is one from the known to an indeterminacy, not a determinacy, and so while it is an apriori argument, the conclusion is extrapolated from the premises, not deduced from this.
A good question, though: Is Kant's great Deduction, really a deduction at all? Of course, later, it will be put argued that deductions never were deductions in this pure sense because conclusions are never purely deduced as all premises themselves rest on the indeterminacies of language meaning. All bachelors are unmarried cannot be conceived as analytic because the ideas themselves are filled with different senses (Quine. See that argument in The Two Dogmas).
I said Dennett really DOES understand the world. I meant to say, that he does NOT. That this is what happens when all eyes are on how well one constructs an argument.
You had written:
So that which is not understood never appears? Guys walking down the street, hears a loud bang from around the corner. An appearance to his ears, manifesting as a sensation of sound is immediately given, without him immediately understanding the cause of it.
The issue was whether or not the understanding attends spontaneous events like hearing a loud bang. I said it did, for hearing at all, for us, is a structured affair, that is, when we "experience" anything at all, there is the implicit understanding thta this fits into a familiar course of events, and is not alien or threatening. The TUA is a temporal architectonics, so the recollections of prior loud bang experiences and the like are foundationally apriori, even if judgment is not explicitly brought to bear on what is occurring. This was the point. You were saying the loud bang was received without understanding, while I was saying the understanding is always already attendant, if implicitly.
Quoting Mww
That is actually an interesting thing to say. What do you mean by "We perceive things in a world; we don't perceive worlds"?
Quoting Mww
It is a moral philosophy that doesn't understand the nature of ethics. Kant is metaethically out to lunch by conceiving a "good will" to be aligned with reason alone. It is, frankly, devoid of meaningful talk about the foundation of moral obligation.
Quoting Mww
But there is no purity in thought; purity is never witnessed. It is transcendental, and can only be inferred, and inferences require meanings on both sides of the inference to make sense. One cannot say that X represents Y if Y is absent altogether. Thus, all representation does is place a division between what is "present" and what is not. But it is nonsense to do this, for a division requires both sides to be intelligible.
Calling it "pure reason" is nonsense unless one can identify what this purity is outside of language.
And this not to say the term transcendental is nonsense. Understanding why this is is a great insight into what it is to be a human (to be a "dasein"). Kant had it right in that metaphysics had to go, but wrong to argue for a rationalistic transcendentalism. Reason "cares" nothing for anything, and to ground our practical matters on this can only come from a the mind of of an anal retentive logician like Kant (who, ironically, is labeled a mere fantasist by another anal retentive logician, Bertrand Russell. Go figure).
Science and aesthetics cannot be separated as they are two aspects of the same human imagination. Science depends on the beauty of the equation and aesthetic form cannot be created by the artists without reasoned and measured method.
Science is a systematic discipline that builds and organises knowledge in the form of testable hypotheses and predictions about the universe. Science can include the Natural Sciences, such as physics, chemistry, and biology, which study the physical world. There are the Social sciences, such as economics, psychology, and sociology, which study individuals and societies. The Applied sciences, such as engineering and medicine, are pragmatic and practical. Finally, the Formal sciences of logic, mathematics, governed by axioms and rules and uses deductive reasoning rather than empirical evidence.
Analytic philosophy is a broad 20th C movement within Western philosophy. It promotes clarity of prose, rigour in argument, and is founded on logic and mathematics. It is characterized by an interest in language, semantics and meaning, also known as the Linguistic Turn. Central figures were Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. The Logical Positivists included Rudolf Carnap, and Ordinary Language Philosophers included WVO Quine. With the decline of Logical Positivism, there was a revival in metaphysics, typified by Saul Kripke.
Analytic philosophy is closely aligned with the scientific method. Analytic philosophy uses clarity of prose, rigour in argument, logic and mathematics, Science systematically organises knowledge in the form of testable hypotheses. Several Analytic philosophers had a scientific, mathematical and logical background, including Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein. Analytic philosophy and science have an interest not only in facts about the world but also about the individual within society. In science are the social sciences of economics, psychology and sociology and in Analytic philosophy are the Ordinary language philosophers, such as Quine.
Aesthetics is included within the philosophy of art, an investigation into the nature of beauty and taste. Aesthetics examines the value of, and makes critical judgments about artistic taste and preferences. It asks how artists imagine, create, and perform works of art, as well as how people use, enjoy, and criticize art. Aesthetics tries to find answers to what exactly is art and what makes good art. The philosophy of art asks what happens in our minds when we view visual art, listen to music or read poetry. As Aristotle said, mimesis is a natural instinct of humanity that separates humans from animals.
Continental philosophy is derived from the Kantian tradition, although is more a family resemblance across disparate philosophical views. Whereas the Analytic is technical, the Continental is literary. Continental philosophy has four main attributes. It generally rejects the view that the natural sciences are the only or most accurate way of understanding natural phenomena. It takes into account Kant's conditions of possible experience, which in large part depends on context, language, culture, history. It accepts that if human experience is contingent, then this opens up the possibility of personal change in the Marxist tradition of personal, moral, political. Continental philosophy can be foundational a priori, can investigates both the cultural and practical and can also be of the opinion that no philosophy can succeed, a position taken by Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and the later Heidegger.
Continental philosophy can be associated with the aesthetic more than the factual, being a subjective state of mind in the individual rather than the objective fact in the world. Continental philosophy rejects the view that science is the best way to understand the world. Aesthetics is about what happens in the emotional mind of the observer when they see paintings, listen to music or read poetry. Continental philosophy in the belief that human experience is contingent allows the possibility of change , persona, moral and political. In aesthetics, the individual is not a passive recipient of beauty, but actively criticizes the art they experience, can imagine different possibilities and can create their own new experiences and invent new performatives. Continental philosophy accepts that even philosophy may not succeed in its own goals, seen in Nietzsche's perspectivism, the existentialism of Kierkegaard and Heidegger's questioning of the meaning of being. In aesthetics, there is no final goal, but the journey is the experience. The experience is both pleasurable in itself and sufficient in itself .
Science needs aesthetics and aesthetics needs science. The tension between art and science may be traced back to the Greeks, to the ancient conflict of Apollo and Dionysus, between order, reason, and logic and chaos, emotion, and ecstasy. There is the sublime in both the aesthetic and the scientific, in both its theory and practice. The aesthetics of science is the study of beauty and matters of taste within the scientific endeavour. Aesthetic features like simplicity, elegance and symmetry are sources of wonder and awe for many scientists, thus motivating scientific pursuit. Both use representation and the role of values. Both combine the subjective with the objective, imagination with creativity, the inspirational and the pragmatic. In e = mc 2 is an aesthetic beauty.
Science and aesthetics need each other. Science lacking aesthetic form blocks human understanding and the aesthetic experience without a solid methodical foundation will lack import.
(Using Wikipedia Science, Analytic Philosophy, Aesthetics, Continental Philosophy.)
Quite a thing to say, and I wonder if Nietzsche would agree, being so close to his Birth of Tragedy. But keep in mind that science has no interest in the aesthetic features of science any more than knitting qua knitting has interest in the joy of knitting. Sure, scientists are fascinated, engaged, in awe, and the rest, but as a body of inquiry and the things it deals with, it does not and cannot touch the aesthetic or the ethical, and this is because what these essentially are cannot be empirically determined.
Arguing that science is essentially aesthetic is a defensible position, I believe. Rorty thinks like this and Dewey thinks like this, and the sense of it lies in the pragmatic reduction of all of our affairs to experience and its structure, a reduction that takes analysis beneath everyday categories to the
"essential" existential features, and here we find cognition, affectivity, anticipation, regret, resolution, and on and on possessed in the singularity of a conscious act. But, of course, these are philosophers, not scientists, who think like this.
But where you talk about continental philosophy, this I understand to be where your interests lie, no? You see in this thread I am arguing with Mww about Kant. Right, of course, to say phenomenology begins with Kant (but then, Kant begins with Aristotle, and Hume, and so on), but I am arguing that Kant is kind of like Hobbes, who wrote the Leviathan as a treatise on legitimate sovereignty: Nobody thinks like Hobbes now (well, Trump, maybe??), but he opened a door wide in the response to what he said, and in that, he is great because he started talk about contract theory. Kant was a rationalist, but reason, Hume said, cares nothing for human existence, for reason does "care" at all.
The nature of ethics/aesthetics is the most important philosophical issue there is. As Von Hildebrandt put it, it is the nature "importance" itself that is first philosophy. To understand ethics, one has to to phenomenology.
I'll stop here, but any thoughts you may have here or elsewhere are welcome.
Quoting Astrophel
Quoting Mww
.second was .
Quoting Astrophel
Except Kants is a speculative metaphysic, in which the transcendental philosophy constructed to account for it, may not properly account for what is the case. Thus, your notion of extrapolation can only refer to the move from what is the case, not to what must be the case to account for it, but only to a possible accounting. Regardless of how exact and internally consistent his system may be, it may not be whats actually happening between our ears. Hes very specific in saying, if this way is sufficient then it is so only if it is done right. Hence, if pure reason is the way, then to critique it leads to doing it right.
What must be the case is determinable by the physical sciences alone, and he makes it quite clear that metaphysics is not a proper science, nor can it be, from which it follows that metaphysics alone cannot necessarily be the case that accounts for what is.
Knowing metaphysics is not necessarily right in accounting for what is, all thats left to us is to make it less wrong.
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Quoting Astrophel
Technically, what is irrevocably the case, is Nature. What must be the case to account for Nature, is guesswork originated by our intellect, and that conditioned by time and circumstance. Thus, what must be the case, is in fact quite contingent, the more parsimonious way to account for our intellectual errors.
If the perspective is limited to the human himself, Nature being given, what is irrevocably the case is nothing more than sensation, insofar as that is the point at which the internal mechanisms of human intellect .of whatever form that may be .become first apparent.
If youre referring to aesthetic judgement as what is the case, as opposed to discursive judgement of the understanding, then were talking of two different conditions. But in relation to what is, aesthetic judgement respects only how we feel about it, rather than how we account for it.
Quoting Astrophel
Gettin pretty far into the weeds here, so loosely put is quite apropos. Those judgements structured by pure reason are principles, therefore called apodeitic or necessary, which serve as rules for the function of understanding in its empirical employment. The structure of judgements in general, called either problematic or assertorical, merely represents the unity between the conceptions in the subject to the predicate of any cognition, a function belonging to understanding alone. Whether or not this conception belongs to that conception, hence the truth or falsity of the cognition relative to those empirical conditions from which they arise, re: phenomena, THAT is the purview of reason.
When I think, and my thoughts succeed each other without conflict, my judgements are rational and/or logical. If I think, and then I have to think again or think otherwise, in which case there is a conflict in my judgements, it is reasons judging that informs of the conflict, either regarding my understanding with itself, or my understanding with experience. Not what such conflict is, how it has manifested itself, but that there is one. Hence the transcendental nature of those judgements structured by pure reason as principles, that by which those discursive judgements is informed of its errors.
Quoting Astrophel
If it is the case all things are first evidenced by their effect on the senses, where does judgement appear? Do we really need to judge whether or not our senses have been affected? That they are or that they are not, to be considered as judgements as such? If such is the criteria for the structure of judgements in general, on order for them to appear, what is to be done with the relation between a phenomenon and the conceptions by which it is cognized? And if such is the case, what does pure reason have to do with it?
It is the case, however, that judgement does appear by the cognition that the world is that in which all possible things are first evidenced, but that merely treats world as a general condition for things for which evidence is possible. In other words, world is the predicate of a principle given a priori in transcendental logic. There remains the need for the intuition of that space in which a thing is first evidenced, and a time by which that thing relates to a perception of it, in neither of which does a judgement manifest itself.
(Sidebar: here, world, in Kant, is reality) For whatever thats worth ..
Quoting Astrophel
No manifestation of discursive judgement in phenomena, but there is imagination, every bit as facilitating as judgement, for a priori argument. As I mentioned above, aesthetic judgement is manifest in the subject as his underlying condition, or, which is the same thing, how he feels about what he perceives. But that relates more to what he feels ought to be, rather than what is.
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Quoting Astrophel
This part of the conversation originated in .
Quoting Astrophel
and my Nope referred to my contention Kant wouldnt have constructed that sentence. But I guess that wasnt the point, in that whatever the sentence being constructed by anybody, it must first accord with some logical or presupposed condition by which the subject doing the sentential constructing understands himself.
Now, Im summarily rejecting that idea, because I contend he who constructs a sentence already understands himself, the constructed sentence merely an expression of that understanding. Id further stipulate that he wouldnt construct a sentence at all if he didnt understand himself, or, if he did stab at in in hopes of expressing himself accurately, he wouldnt have a clue whether or not he actually did.
So when I, e.g., tell you about the time I fell out of a tree, there would certainly be a logical structure presupposed in the construction of the sentence by which I relay my experience, but if we both look a little closer, we find that all Ive done is replicate the very logical structure and presuppositions which gave me the experience to tell you about. And here, the categories would fill the bill as logical structural predicates and necessary presuppositions.
But if I tell you about, e.g., the merely qualitative effect imposed on me by the observation of Starlink ..breathtaking, by the way, jaw-dropping in its unexpectedness. I mean WTF was THAT??? I had to look it up. Didnt know there was such a thing. Too far removed from my acid days, so I wasnt afraid Id lost it. Anyway .point being, categories required for the observation, but not for the qualitative effect of it on me.
So, while I might agree logical presupposedness is what the Critique is all about, Id maintain it is the logical presupposedness of thought and reason, and thought, in its turn, is the presupposedness of language.
And ya know what .logical structure presupposed in understanding a sentences meaning, might be restricted to the form of logic, yet the sentence itself by which it is expressed, necessarily concerns the content of that logic. I mean you cant really presuppose content, can you? It being as varied and indiscriminate as circumstance permits.
Are we mistaking the description of a system, for its operation?
Kant is talking about his own idea of whats happening when the human animal uses his intellect.
Whats the problem with talking about pure thought using language, and exercising pure thought without it? Please dont tell me you talk to yourself, prescribe in words or logic symbols the individual actions required to tie your shoes. Odd that you can tie your shoes faster than you can prescribe each act required in order to tie your shoes, innit?
When youre reading something particularly engaging .ever notice the words merely represent a certain assemblage of conceptions you already have, and the author is only trying to make you mentally image whats hes already done for himself. And its only in the case where you dont have for yourself this certain assemblage, that you have to stop and read again, or look up to the sky and .you know, think .about what the author wants you to imagine.
I have no problem whatsoever asserting thats the way my system works, and Im almost as certain thats the way your system works, too. That language must take precedence, is .beneath the dignity of philosophy .**, yet at the same time perfectly authorized to ground ..philosophizing in an orderly manner .***
(**1787; ***1644)
Quoting Astrophel
Nope. One has to think to conceive of pure thought, which may then be talked about. One doesnt talk about that of which he has no conception.
Quoting Astrophel
Youre asking about justifying a contradiction? Of course one cannot talk about what stands outside of talk. You must realize we invent the objects used to represent our thinking, the words. For whatever is used for thinking, a word can be invented to represent it. Whatever is thought about, a word can be invented to represent it.
There are no words possible to represent, we cannot meaningfully talk about, only that which cannot be thought, on the one hand, and, we never invent a word then think a conception belonging to it, on the other.
Quoting Astrophel
Given the subject matter of the Dialectic, I gather that somehow youre saying Mannys exposè demonstrating the illegitimacy ol Renès cogito principle, is just as bad as the principle itself.
Interesting, but Id have to think awful hard nonetheless about how sophistical arguments and paralogisms are just as bad as that which guards against them.
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Quoting Astrophel
Ya know .Kant used mathematics to prove the very possibility of synthetic a priori cognitions. Once their possibility is proved, he then goes about finding them in cognitions other than mathematical. So if it is proven there are rules for understanding, it is perfectly reasonable to suppose there are rules for speaking. On the other hand, while it is perfectly reasonable that to misuse the rules of understanding results in incorrect thinking, it is absurd to suppose the misuse of the rules for speaking results in incorrect speech, or language in general.
And if I dont agree logic is discovered, then it follows that the discovery of logic in the rules for speech is beyond the agreement pale.
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Quoting Astrophel
Maybe they are, but why cant a postulate have a use in keeping with the theory to which it belongs. Sorta like Newtons g: no such thing but a necessary component in the law of universal gravitation.
Quoting Astrophel
It isnt a thing to see, and one doesnt use it like a tool or a device of some kind. It is .they are ..merely explanatory devices used by the intellect, in accordance with a particular theory. Avoided or dismissed by a different theory of course, but no less a component of the theory to which they belong.
Quoting Astrophel
Yes, but the evidential basis for their use lies exclusively in some speculative idea of a system. One who thinks a metaphysical system comes to be on account of the speaking of it, still has to explain where the speaking came from. Not only that, but how to explain, in one example of a veritable plethora thereof, how Joyce and Gell-Mann related the same word for entirely different chains of thought.
Quoting Astrophel
A proper understanding of the theory in its entirety leads to the recognition that exist is not meant in its categorical sense. One is supposed to connect the conceptions in conjunction with the context of their appearance, rather than strict accordance with some classification which forces a contradiction.
It is nonsense like that, for which the supposed remedies were to be found in language games and intentionality. Which reduces to .paraphrasing his words ..dont bother with the rationality of theoretical speculations, but instead, waste effort on faulting its presentation.
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Quoting Astrophel
It doesnt. Cognitive faculties attend mediately to first-order events, immediately to second-order events that are representations thereof; sensibility attends immediately.
Hearing is indeed a structured affair, a physiologically structured affair predicated on physical attributes.
For any experience, yes, there is an implicit course of events, pursuant to the method by which experience is even possible. What those events are, and the course they take, depends on the theory in which they are the constituents.
And yes, threats may themselves be experiences. And technically, any experience having no antecedent consciousness relating to it, is alien. Foreign. Previously unaware.
Quoting Astrophel
He was quite explicit in declaring that there will always be some form of metaphysics in any human who rises to the height of speculation ..
Metaphysics had to go iff it was intended as, or attempted to be made into, a science. So dont; no problem.
What is the case is the synthetic apriority in language relations with the world. Clearly the move from this is not going to be something determinate, and I did say this earlier when I was talking about the conditions of a proper logical deduction. What must be the case is always going to be the unknown X, but the point is that it must be something, and if one must give a reason why there must be something, one does the Critique. Extrapolations do not lead to certainies, only indeterminacies, and this is why I think this term right, because Kant's argument does not give us determinacy, for this is impossible.
Then what kind of deduction is this? Kant tells us it is a quid juris matter, and this is curious, isn't it? This is a legal term, not a matter of fact (quid facti), but one of right, and so he tells us such cases are never perfectly conceived. I think what he is up to is that in dealing with facts of the world, states of affairs, deduction moves to conclusions in the regular way, and an "empirical deduction" is loosely conceived (as Sherlock Holmes "deduces") and not in terms of the deductive argument contra inductive argument distinction; but in dealing with legal determinations, one is not given merely facts. He says this (A 85), speaking of the way the law faces its uncertainties:
But there are also usurpatory concepts, such as fortune, fate, which, though allowed to circulate by almost universal indulgence, are yet from time to time challenged by the question: quid juris. This demand for a deduction involves us in considerable perplexity, no clear legal title, sufficient to justify their* employment, being obtainable either from experience or from reason.
That is a big confession, for legal outcomes are never certain when "fortune and fate" are duly considered; because fortune and fate take the argument into a sea of uncertainty impossible to calculate. Justice is not quid facti, nor is the transcendental deduction. This is the best he can do, analogize the transcendental deduction to dejure legal thinking, and the question of whether the logical move is one of extrapolation then goes to whether such quid juris inquiry is extrapolatory.
Not sure about that. I'll have to think about it.
Quoting Mww
I would argue against the way you put things. Not that science can ever determine what must be the case, but that science deals through premises that are a posteriori, but the logical structure of the judgments in play are apriori in their form. But then, yes, if things fall with repeatable results to the ground, and not otherwise, then a scientific principle can be conceived, and IN this principle there is acknowledged the category of universality (as opposed to an existential quantifier). The logic, not the science, gives this the "what must be the case" in the apodicticity of the universality of the judgment "All things fall toward and not away".
Less wrong? But how can one be more or less wrong about something transcendental? One is confined entirely to what is given and this is certainly limiting, for what is, after all, the evidence? It is apodicticity in judgment and experience, the so called apiority in synthetic judgments.
Rather, consider that what is transcendent is discovered IN what is immanent, and here the language that is deployed attempts to step where it has no place.
So it is the language that sets up Kant's thinking, and this is the language of finitude. The term transcendental is borrowed entirely from mundane thinking, or is it? This, to me, is the fascinating question. Take the "evidence" for the deduction, the structural logical properties of language. One can at best say that this is in the simple giveness of the world, but then, and this is the important part of this, everything is simply given. Kant's move is a metaphysical move, yet the metaphysics that inspires it issues not from some impossible to conceive transcendental foundation for reason, but rather from the transcendence that permeates, if you will, the entire horizon of the world's givenness. To see where Kant ends and the full analysis begins, see Heidegger, then the post Heideggerians, then the post post Heideggerians.
If one takes the idea of transcendental idealism seriously, one will have to eventually drop the rationalistic reduction, and acknowledge that philosophy must perform a reduction on the entirely of our existence. Husserl begins this, Heidegger continues this with, if you will, the first radical exposition of the human soul (dasein. Soul is my choice of words, but this is just because Kant and early Heidegger's attempt to finitize what we and the world are--notwithstanding the transcendental deduction abstract attempt to go beyond this---are a failure). Radical because we have left the Kantian abstract reduction and stepped into the reality before our waking eyes. You do not stand before a foundational logical anomaly (Kant); you ARE a foundational "anomaly" (though, this opens up other matters, like the what makes something an anomaly).
Quoting Mww
But Kant's analysis of nature is merely an analysis of logic. Calling the world "sensible intuition" is just dismissive. And the logicality of language is an abstraction; an abstraction from the totality of engagement. The full transcendental dimension of our being-in-the-world is untouched. To say "only how we feel about it" is simply to ignore it. Consider that this feeling is the very basis of, as Von Hildebrandt put it, importance. Wittgenstein refused to talk about value, feeling, aesthetics, not because, as the postivists held, there was nothing there, but because it was too important to allow philosophy to undermine and trivialize it. Wittgenstein was right AND wrong.
Quoting Mww
I have no issues with this, I don't think. I mean, sure, this is the kind of thing Kant is saying. It is just that the weeds are off and away from this. Kant's is a well trimmed lawn with pink flamingoes facsimiles and Snow White dwarf facsimiles here and there.
Quoting Mww
Go with, the world is that in which all things are evidenced, and leave it at that. The predicate you have in mind would be, For every possible X, if X IS, then X is in and of a world. Something like that. Of course, the burden the is upon the verb 'to be' and this is where works like "Being and Time" come in. That copula 'is' is what needs to be examined.
Quoting Mww
Then the feeling about what she ought to be has status as a phenomenon. Depends on who you read, but I see nothing to stop imagination to have equal ontological standing to this lamp on the table. Both are interpretatively grounded and both appear before me. Of course, these are classified "ontically" (in the usual ways) differently, but so is everything.
The question about affectivity, the "pathos" of our existence, is one that, like Kant's pure reason, begs for a transcendental accounting. But where Kant seeks the ground for an abstraction, inquiry into this "existence" begins with something palpable and inherently important. For example, a spear to the kidney. Now, do an transcendental deduction on THAT. No, I mean literally, do a Kantian styled deduction, keeping certain things keenly in mind: The pain, like the formal dimensions of experience, is a given, and as such has its transcendental ground outside of the interpretative possibilities of the finite totality of what is known. But what is transcendental here is not the impossible abstraction of pure reason, but the existential reality of the "pure" affectivity. What is meant by "pure" affectivity (the word taken here to encompass the ethical/aesthetic dimension of our world).
LIke Kant, we reduce experience by freeing it of all incidentals, the quid facti states of affairs, so that the essential nature can be revealed. This is an inquiry into the bonum and the malum, and is the most salient feature of our existence being carried to its foundation. The deduction is, of course, to a purity that is, granted, abstracted from ordinary matters, but what is left after the reduction is very different from conceptual form as such. We have touched upon, as Michel Henry puts it, life.
I wrote some things below, but my final comment seems the best, so I brought it up to the beginning. One of my favorite questions:
One last thought: Does General Motors exist? Another odd question, for surely it does and has thousands of employees, and so on. But at one time it did not exist. How is it that something that did not exist come into existence? Simple, GM is a complex pragmatic institution that is foundationally a language entity (perhaps therefore a social entity. Says Rorty, who thinks science is a social entity). I think of how it was in language that GM was conceived. carried out, broadened, incorporated, and all the rest. And I think of all the businesses, and schools, and government functions, and then the essential institution of our cuture, the marriages and funerals, the way we organize our time, our zones of possession, and, well, just everything. And then, the critical insight: Isn't a tree simply an "institution" as well? Prior to language, what "is" it?
The point is that language has brought upon us a dimension of existence in which meanings synthesize, not just logical abstractions, to generate reality, being. I see a stone, and what makes it a stone is not some prior qualities inherent in the stone, for talk about qualities at all IS a language event.
I've decided to erase all the rest, so it's gone. This little paragraph above makes the point rather well: Our world is a world of institutions, that is, of instituted knowledge claims, such that what is known is derived from the language/culture matrix in which we are immersed. Rorty said the world is made, not discovered, and this has always stuck with me, because when it comes to saying what the world is, what Being and its beings IS, I find nothing but language. But this doesn't diminish what is discovered at all. What, after all, is language? This, too, is a transcendental question: language interrogating language (as we are doing now) regarding the nature of language. Identity is bound up in language, for the question of who I am itself is born out of language.
And when there is that loud bang behind me, I am always already, ready to assimilate it into a body of institutions already there. Why that sounds like a someting fell off a truck, or like thunder or an explosion, and so on.
There are similarities between the topics of science and aesthetics which are more than coincidental. One the one hand, aesthetics is about the relationship between the objective particular aesthetic object in the world and the subjective universal aesthetic object in the mind. On the other hand, science is about the relationship between the objective particular event in the world and the subjective universal law about that particular event in the mind. For both aesthetics and science, the particular in the world and the universal in the mind are connected by what Kant called transcendental apperception.
The aesthetic can be looked at in two ways. Firstly, the term was initially used by Alexander Baumgarten. It was borrowed from the Greek word for sensory perception, to denote concrete knowledge that we gain through our senses. Secondly, as a synonym for "taste", in being able to distinguish between those objects worthy of contemplation and those objects not worthy. When we observe an object about which we have a subjective aesthetic feeling, either we have an aesthetic feeling because the object is an aesthetic object, or the object is not an aesthetic object but we are able to perceive an aesthetic in the shapes and colours we experience as sensory phenomena. Post-Kant, the aesthetic is considered as the synthesis of both these, sensory experience and intellectual judgment.
You raise the question as to whether science has an interest in the aesthetic features of science, and as to whether that science is in its essence, aesthetic. Science starts with particular observations, and its goal is to discover from these particular observations universal laws. Such universal laws enable science to predict future phenomenal states. There are two ways of doing this. Either by looking at each particular observation one at a time and through reason and logic combine them into a whole, or by immediately perceiving a gestalt, an immediate unity of parts as an aesthetic. In Kant's words, a unity of apperception. Kant's transcendental apperception is the uniting and building of coherent consciousness out of different elementary inner experiences. Such experiences differ in both time and topic, but all belong to the individual's self-consciousness. Science discovers universal laws from particular observations, both by logical reasoning about the parts making up a whole and by aesthetic intuition about a whole made up of parts .
You also raise the question about Kant's rationalism, his logical reasoning. Though, as Hume said, reason cares nothing for human existence. In fact, reason does not "care" at all. Kant combined Rationalism with Empiricism though Transcendental Idealism. Rationalism is the belief that particular sense experiences are necessary in order for us to discover concepts and knowledge. However, they are not sufficient. One needs in addition the ability to logically reason about these particular sense experiences. Empiricism is the belief, as with Rationalism, that particular sense experiences are necessary in order for us to discover concepts and knowledge. However, for the Empiricists, these experiences can be sufficient. Sometimes, however, logical reasoning may be of assistance in clarifying certain sense experiences. The staring point for both the Rationalist and Empiricist are the phenomena of particular observations. It is through these phenomena that there is the possibility of discovering universal truths. There are two aspects to the aesthetic. First, there is the aesthetic object within sensory experience as an objective entity, and second there is the aesthetic object within the mind as subjective feeling. Science also has two similar aspects. First the particular object experienced as phenomena and second the universal object experienced as a concept. Science is the discovery of the universal from the particular. Science starts with the aesthetic objective object within sense experience and discovers the aesthetic subjective object within a concept.
One belief about the aesthetic object is that the aesthetic object needs no practical use to be aesthetic. Taking their cue from Kant, many philosophers have defended the idea of an aesthetic attitude as one divorced from practical concerns. This is a kind of distancing, or "standing back" from ordinary involvement. Kant described the recipients of aesthetic experience not as distanced but as disinterested. In other words, the recipient does not treat the object of enjoyment either as a vehicle for curiosity or as a means to an end. They contemplate the object as it is in itself and apart from all interest. An object such as a hammer, which has a practical use, is not aesthetic because it has a practical use, but rather an object, such as a Derain painting, which has no practical use, can still be aesthetic. Arthur Schopenhauer argued that people could regard anything aesthetically so long as they regarded it as independent of their will. That is, irrespective of any use to which they might put it.
Yet there is a paradox here. On the one hand we observe particular shapes and colours within our phenomenal sensory experience which we intuitively find aesthetic. This does not need a reasoned judgment. On the other hand, we instinctively reason that it is not the case that we subjectively perceive an object as aesthetic, but rather that there will be universal agreement amongst everyone perceiving the same object that the object is objectively aesthetic. The aesthetic object is an object of sensory experience. The aesthetic object is not merely as an object of sensory pleasure but also as the repository of significance and value. This synthesis is summarised in Hegel's "the sensuous embodiment of the Idea". There is the sensory: concrete, individual, particular and determinate, and there is the intellectual: abstract, universal, general and indeterminate. This synthesis however gives rise to a paradox, as described by Kant in his antimony of taste.
The human expresses their subjective pleasure in an object as if beauty was an objective property of the object. The human is making a universal general objective judgement about their immediate particular subjective feelings. Feelings about an object are particular and individual, so why do we want universal agreement about the nature of the object. There is a contradiction in making a universal judgment based on particular intuitions. The phrase "aesthetic judgment" is a contradiction in terms, yet we make aesthetic judgements all the time For example, I can accept someone as an expert in nuclear physics, of which I have no experience, yet I cannot accept someone as an expert as to the merits of a Derain painting unless I have had personal experience. There are universal rules in science but no universal rules in beauty. Yet we make aesthetic judgments, such that Derain is a great artist. We can make reasoned justifications for our aesthetic judgements, such as about Derain. We can do this because reasoned justifications can never be purely intellectual but must also be partly based on feeling.
Science and aesthetics are both about the relationship between the world and the mind, the concrete particular and the general universal.
References
Britannica - The Aesthetic Experience
SEP - Rationalism vs Empiricism
Kant's does talk about pure reason, and it does make sense to do so, I claim. But then, as Wittgenstein said later, it really is nonsense as well, because in order to speak of pure reason, one has to stand apart from it and observe it from another perspective, for not to do this would be assuming what needs to be shown, and this is just question begging: language/logic cannot even imagine its own nature. All it can do is work within what this nature provides. Logic is shown, but cannot show itself, for this source is transcendental, that is, in order for it to understand itself, there would need to be a third perspective that stands outside of whta logic shows and outside of what logic IS, but this third perspective itself would then raise the same question, namely, that regarding the source of its authority, and this would require yet another perspective; and this is an infinite regression. It's a bit like trying to bring to light some absolute notion of velocity: one would have to be "absolutely" still to have this perspective, but how does one determine whether or not one is moving AT ALL? One would have to stand "outside" of movement altogether to talk about how fast something is moving absolutely. But one can't do this for this absolute perspective would always be questionable regarding whether of not IT is moving. One would have to stand outside movement ITSELF.
So reason asking about the nature of reason really is nonsense. And yet, it makes sense as well, because, and this is a difficult issue, I know, because IN language, language's own foundational indeterminacy is observed, and this is not merely in the logic of words, but is experienced in the uncanniness of our existence. The real question of metaphysics only arises when we acknowledge the givenness of the world as "pure" givenness, that is, the purity of givenness lies with "being as such" the openness of our existence. Kant looks at the world as closed, in both content and logic. If all is well and good, he writes under the heading Transcendental Illusion, "No natural force can of itself deviate from its own laws. Thus neither the understanding by itself (uninfluenced by another cause), nor the senses by themselves, would fall into error." What he fails to see is that logic is NOT closed like this, because language, where we find logic, is contingent, and language is contingent because it is historical. In other words, apodicticity is first discovered as a particle of language. Just ask, what is logic? You will find more language. Ask what any of this is, and you will find more language. Language never really "touches" anything beyond language, and yet, as Dewey et al held, it "works"!
BUT, does this mean the world as it "really is" is just a nonsense term? Like talking about absolute velocity? Tricky. Because as we all know, the world is right there in front of me, and this cannot be doubted, or something there, in its presence, cannot be doubted; impossible to "say" because it is not language. This is where continental philosophy begins, sort of, but I put the inevitable metaethical condition into play: put your finger over a lighted match. Can one doubt this? Now THAT is apodicticity! There is no historicity and its contingency of language here that gives rise to doubt, nor is this an abstraction. It is the opposite of an abstraction, the clearest most vivid thing one can imagine.
So just to sum up: Kant was seeking a bottom line, and he thought he found it in the purity of logic. But he missed the mark by a mile. We know logic only in the medium of the language that conceives it, and this is discursive, derivative. True apodicticity is found existentially in the only absolute there is, which is outside language. Now, you may see a contradiction here because I argued earlier that language/thought/logic attends everything implicitly in overt experience. This is an issue worthy of discussion.
I discuss this in greater depth in this post under the "Venn Diagram" section https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/15689/page/p1
These beg the basic question: what is the aesthetic experience "as such"? The Greek sense has no bearing here; and to refer to "taste" simply shows how misaligned philosophy was with the world. Ask, what is the world? with only true descriptive intent, putting aside the zeal for objectifying and categorizing, and one finds something that altogether defies philosophical objectification, and this is where the significance, is discovered. What is sought, as with Kant, is something that is a stand alone, or, as Kierkegaard put is, "stands as its own presupposition". He thought this could only lie in transcendence, but he really didn't understand that if transcendence is what must account for what is witnessed in logic, then the same goes for all of experience, or all of being-in-the-world.
Consider aesthetics as modality of value, and value to refer to a dimension of our existence that deals with the "good" and so the question goes to the nature of the this very mysterious term, mysterious when considered phenomenologically, and not in some framework of contingency that explains matters is "other terms" and in doing this endlessly begs the question regarding these terms, and then the terms used to account for these, and on. This touches on Derrida, doesn't it? And it is not going to find relief in the traditional thinking.
Quoting RussellA
Note that you are right say I raised the question as to whether science has interest in aesthetics, but not that wondered if science is in its essence, aesthetic. On the matter I did express interest in, forget about Kant, whose thoughts about aesthetics are complicated, needlessly, if you ask me, and ask why science cannot speak about aesthetics or ethics. It is because these are not discovered empirically. The essence of aesthetics is value, and this is not detectable in a telescope, a microscope, nor in quantitative discussions about these. It is like Michel Henry said regarding science's reductive attempts: tear apart the observable things of a human body, and you will not find a "self" anywhere; you will not find fear, desire, love, hate, anticipation, delight, and so on. None of this shows up, and none of this essential ground for aesthetic and ethical affairs.
Thus science has no interest because it cannot have an interest. There is nothing to "observe". But then, the essence of aesthetics is, again, value, that is--no value, no aesthetics. So as Kant said, we go around talking as if our judgments about art are objective, but the ground for this lacks universality, and being a good rationalist, this undoes its objectivity. But not really. The question goes to apodicticity: what is the basis for universality and necessity? Rationality's apodicticity lies not in intersubjective agreement, but in its intrinsic properties, e.g., it is the structure itself of something like modus ponens that mkes for its apriority, and this has nothing to do with what others think, so we put aside this disagreement that qualifies something as mere "taste" and we ask simply if the aesthetic "presence" is qualitatively apodictic, that is, does it possess necessity?
For this we move to a deduction, that is, we reduce the aesthetic/ethics event to its essence (as Kant did with reason) and in this we discover the "pure" affective dimension of our existence (as Kant discovered pure reason). Note how in actual experience, there is no such thing as this purity, for experience is always already entangled. But this is an analytic exercise, and the purity in question is an abstraction from the totality of experience; but having said this, it by no means means that what is isolated for discovery isn't really there. Just the opposite. The whole point is to show that it IS.
What does one discover in this sketch of a transcendental deduction to "pure" aesthetics? One finds the good and the bad, the bonum and the malum, if you like, for the Latin terms pulls thought away from mundanity. What Moore once called non natural properties, something analytic philosophers cringe at.
Of course, an actual deduction like this would take a great deal of "quid juris" work, as Kant put it, but I think it works.
Quoting RussellA
This is exposition. Fine.
Quoting RussellA
I've always though this a most curious use of the term "disinterested". Yes, I know what he means, but really? I mean there nothing more engaging of one's "interest" than art, music and the affectivity of these. I mean, the very definition of what it is to be aesthetic is to BE interested. At any rate, sure, one is not bound to an end, for the experience is an end unto itself, possesses its own validation, stands as its own presupposition. Take this further: the aesthetic experience as such is not contingent on anything else for being what it is. Kant should see that this is the very goal of the Critique, to discover that which is what it is apart from relational derivation.
Quoting RussellA
Hegel is another rationalist, and my approach is to do with reason what Kant did with sensible intuition: essentially dismiss it in the reductive attempt to uncover the nature of the aesthetic, the "pure" aesthetic. I acknowledge reason and language, but this stands outside of the "deduction".
Quoting RussellA
Now, this is something you believe to be true, right? You really think that "aesthetic judgment" is a contradiction in terms.
A few things: A minor point about the physicist and art expert, which is I thing even if you haven't seen a Derain, you would still hold the art expert's opinion high.
Regarding universality and aesthetic judgment, I argue that Saying X is good may disagree with someone else's opinion about X, BUTthis is because we are not talking about the same X, or, I am talking about X! and the other is talking about X2. X1 is good to me, and it would be good to the other as well IF the other were to experience X1, but she is not, een though X goes by the same name, her X2 is not my X1, because if it were, she would appreciate it just as I do; she would by necessity! Why? Because X1 IS the complex of appreciative factors that fingure into my experience, and they are vast, the vast constituents of all that makes the experience of X1 what it is. The other, were she exactly in my shoes, so to speak, would adore X1 as I do because nothing would change in the equation of X1.
And this is just what Kant has in mind with universality and necessity and agreement which is not a choice but apodictically coercive in formal dimensions of reason. Note that when I say I agree with you as you affirm the logicality and validity of a syllogism, I do not have direct access to your rational grasp of the syllogism. I simply assume we are witnessing the same thing (you know, Quine indirectly takes this kind of thing to task in his indeterminacy thesis) because we speak the coercivity of it with absolute agreement. Well, the same would be the case if with the aesthetic IF I had access to your X1 instead of my own X2. Ask: assuming you experience X1 and I experience X2, are YOU apodictically coerced in your conviction that the qualities you apprehend in X1 are good? Assuming the X1 is not ambiguous, of course you are. Just as when I feel wonderful, I am apodictically coerced into acknowledging this. Kant is transfixed by apriority, but he should be equally transfixed by everything else, simply because everything else is apodictically coercive in this value dimension of our existence.
Just ask: there you are in terrible suffering. How certain are you about this, and how does this compare to the universality and necessity of apriority? Is the latter really more so? I think not.
Quoting Astrophel
I would perhaps listen to an art expert's opinion that Derain painted Le séchage des voiles in 1905, but I would take any art expert's opinion that this painting is a great work of art with a pinch of salt, even though in fact I do believe that this painting is a great work of art.
In the world, objects have properties. It is said that some properties are objective facts, such that Derain's painting was painted in 1905, and some properties are subjective judgements, such that Derain's painting is good.
Some properties, such as good, are clearly subjective judgements, but other properties, such that this object is a painting, which appear objective facts, are also subjective judgements.
As you say, Quine points out the indeterminacy of translation.
Person A born in 1950 and brought up in South Africa and person B born in 2005 and brought up in Nevada will have different understandings about the same concept. For example, person A's concept of a forest, a savanna woodland, will be different to person B's concept of a forest, sparse juniper pine.
As you also say, in fact, person A's understanding of every concept will be different to person B's understanding of the same concept.
No concept can be an objective fact in the world, but rather every concept must be a subjective judgement. Not only is saying that Derain's Le séchage des violes is good is a subjective judgment, but even saying that Derain's Le séchage des violes is a painting is a subjective judgment.
In fact, not only would I take an art expert's opinion that the Derain object is good with a pinch of salt, but philosophically, I should also take the art expert's opinion that the Derain object is a painting also with a pinch of salt.
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Quoting Astrophel
There some things in the world in which we are interested that have a physical affect on us, such as the wind, and there some things in the world in which we are interested that have a mental affect on us, such as an aesthetic.
It would be useful within the philosophy of art to be able to distinguish these two different kinds of interest.
As the term "transcendental idealism" is a definition rather than a description, in the philosophy of art, we can think of "disinterest" also as a definition rather than a description. In other words, we have an interest in things that physically affect us and a disinterest in things that mentally affect us.
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Quoting Astrophel
This needs to be be checked. Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason critiques pure reason, and it is my understanding that he concluded that pure reason is not possible.
Perhaps, depending on context, but Im claiming the irreducible case, hence regardless of context, is Nature. Language relations with the world presupposes the world, and world being the representation of Nature in general, gives the irreducible.
Which gets us to .by quid juris is it, that synthetic apriority in language relations with the world, is the case? Which in turn requires the answer to, the case .for what?
Quoting Astrophel
The kind of deduction is transcendental, insofar as it is free of any empirical conditions. Its right to be a deduction of this kind, is to serve as explanation for possession of the conceptions required in a complete system by which the possibility of human experience is determinable.
Quoting Astrophel
Ehhhhh .methinks tis not so much a confession as a sad commentary on the sorry state of speculative metaphysics. Funny, too, in that the historical record exhibits that Kant allowed himself precious few indulgences of any kind, so there wouldnt be anything of the sort to which a confession of his would refer.
Id also like to revisit your quote in which he says, ( ) if such exist .. At the time, as you well know, synthetic a priori cognitions hadnt been entered into the philosophical vocabulary. He had to prove the validity of the concept, and he said if they exist because no one had yet thought about them as existing. And they dont exist in the strict categorical sense, but I already spoke to that.
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Quoting Astrophel
The circularity of human reason has been long established and thoroughly understood. It is, in fact, the ultimate transcendental illusion not to acquiesce to its inevitability. It is the case, then, the nonsense resides in the continued engagement with the illusion, re:, that pure reason affords absolute certainties, in spite of being given the means to avoid doing so.
And such is the reason metaphysics cannot be a proper science on the one hand, and the transcendental philosophy is above all a purely speculative system on the other.
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Quoting Astrophel
Yeah, it works because the human has this incessant need to express his opinions on every damn thing.
See https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0111332
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Quoting Astrophel
Yep, pure nonsense. But to ask or tell of the world as it really is, is something we do all the time. Sorry, had to; couldnt help myself. Scare quotes .conspicuously absent in those philosophical texts Id invite on a second date.
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Quoting Astrophel
Doubt what? I doubt Id do it. I dont doubt itd hurt, but the apodeicticity (speaking of quid juris, by what right is there some concept to which this word belongs????) here presupposes experience.
There is no historicity (oooo .theres another) of language here, because theres nothing to be said about the pain .and foolishness of putting ones finger over a lighted match.
(Why not contingenicity???)
So if the clearest most vivid thing one can image is that which he cannot doubt .wasnt Descartes right after all?
Quoting Astrophel
Sorta where Ive been coming from since the beginning. True absolute certainty is found outside language because there never could be anything absolutely certain about it.
What the source is presupposes there is such a thing as absolute certainty, which, according to Kants definition is the unconditioned, and that is proved existentially unattainable, and THAT is the purpose of the critique of pure reason.
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Please forgive my frivolity. If one cant have fun with this stuff he shouldnt be doing it.
Talk and think here are the same, as are hand signals, telepathy, facial expressions, brailing, etc., as long as these carry meanings that are structured apriori. Note that when you think you are speaking to yourself.
Quoting Mww
Not about contradiction, but outside of contradiction, affirmation, universal quantifiers, references to particle physics, going out for lunch, and so on. "A word can be invented to represent it": To say "what ever is used for thinking" is a bit shaky, because what is "used" for thinking is thinking, or any of the above I mentioned. But "beneath" this is impossible to talk about. Take contradiction: the difference that constitutes a contradictory proposition is a difference in language, exemplified by alphabetical letters. B is what it is in relation to what it is not, A, and all the rest. Each letter defines the definitional boundaries of the others. Thus, contradiction is a closed systemic affair. This is the way meaning has its identity, IN the matrix of language's differences, or as it has been put, in contexts. "Nothing lies outside the con"text"" is infamous, but the idea is that nothing can "exist" apart from the context in which it is conceived. This all began with Kant. This cat on my lap can only be a cat IN the structured logic that identifies it. What it is "beyond" this is impossible to "say". Pure nonsense to even write these words, 'beyond' and 'say'. This is why they go under erasure as they are put forth.
Quoting Mww
I mean to say that Descartes' cogito is an attempt to identify what cannot be doubted and thus serves as an anchor for constructing a justification for positing a world of things. It establishes a ground for all things that is axiomatic and apodictic. This is, essentially, what Kant was doing. This philosophical move to apodicticity began with Descartes, and is still alive in the neo Husserlian thnking.
Quoting Mww
As long as one doesn't make this reasonable thinking into a transcendental affirmation. It certainly works in familiar matters in the world. You witness something, some gaseous presence on the planet Jupiter, understand that this can only be there if certain conditions apply, etc. but to determine those conditions one has to theorize, let's say, because they are not in the empirical evidence itself, but this theorizing must issue from a matrix of understanding that itself has a proper evidential ground. Transcendental thinking says this evidential ground is absent, but we are going to use language that gets its meanings from things that do have this ground.
But you can't do that. Or can you? I claim, and you know this is THE issue of all issues in philosophy (given that I read continental philosophy, and very little of the analytical tradition) there IS a ground for transcendental thinking. It is our being0in-the-world in which it is found, but remains marginalized because science has such sway in this culture. This will pass.
Quoting Mww
You mean there is something about Kant's transcendental thinking that cannot be dismissed! Most definitely! Kant is essential, for me. Deeply profound, but he is nevertheless relegated to the history of philosophy outside of continental thinking. Though this may be changing, because anaalytic thinking has worn out its welcome, I mean, there are important things, but its dismissal of metaphysics is impossible to defend.
I argue that metaphysics cannot be removed from immanence, what is there before our waking eyes. I think I mentioned that to me, Kant's shortcoming was that he didn;t see that IF one is going to make a transcendental move, it is because he faces something that is present in the world first, and this something is simply given, for him, in the structure of logic discovered in language, everyday language, there, always already there, in Hi, how are you? Look, the rock is going to fall!, and everything else. But this givenness is in ALL things, in the totality of givenness. The world IS givenness, and thus, transcendental thinking is not to be treated abstractly, but existentially, and this changes everything. Value, what Wittgenstein refused to talk about (think about, brail about, whatever), is the essence of aesthetics and ethics. This is transcendental, and morality now finds its true ground for a "good will" and it's not in the deontological ground given by rationality.
Ethics' essence is found in affectivity, the kind of thing Kant strictly and explicitly dismisses.
Quoting Mww
I understand this in terms of contextuality and language games. But then, one inevitably encounters actuality. This is why Witt in the Tractatus said the world and ethics and aesthetics were transcendental and nonsense. He was dismissive of such talk, but then, he never read Heidegger. When is metaphysics NOT metaphysics? When it is dicovered in the analytic of the Real.
Quoting RussellA
When you say calling something good is clearly subjective, this needs a bit of analysis. If by good one refers to a context of good qualities and bad ones, and these qualities are factually given, as when you buy a couch and you are looking for a good one, so comfort, size, fabric and the rest come into play, and these may refer to other objective features, as comfort, for you, means very soft and cushiony, and size refers to the objective dimensions of the new setting, and this explanatory context. it turns out, has a great deal of specificity, but when it comes to the manifest qualities that align with comfort, these can be stated rather plainly. So the "good" of the couch is a mostly public matter, and objective;y conceived when the overt features of the couch are in question. But these features have their telos, if you will. in something that cannot be made public, and this is your sense of comfort itself whether it is comfort about the sitting or about the match to its possible new environment, and the like. Comfort or the good feel of something, this brings in another dimension of expereicne. Not something good FOR, but something just plain Good. the good of pleasure as such, the bad of suffering as such. All contingent goods, goods that are FOR something else, eventually end up at this determinacy, when, plainly put, you just say, I like it! This "liking" is just what it is, and the matter goes no further.
The attempt to say this is not objective but rather subjective rests with an error made confusing contingent qualities with intrinsic goodness they bring about. Comfort to me may be a "matter of taste" but comfort as such is not. It is only that it occurs in one person's world and not in another's, but its occurence is as objective as it gets. Consider that if you are in agony, it is not a matte of opinion or taste, is it?
So I argue that the good, as well as the bad (categories of experience merely) are not subjective in the essence of the judgment that is about art.
And so, if you are aesthetically enraptured (Clive Bell's term) by Derain, I would say true, it is a matter of taste, for, let's say, I am not. But this is not to say the rapture doesn't exist, and IS rapture, and is inherently good as far as this goes. It simply means those contingencies of appreciation are not mine.
This is not, I argue, unlike what Kant does: get past the contingencies of language's entanglements, the incidental features of the judgments we make, and look into essential structures of those judgments, experiences, and you will find something transcendental. The GOOD is transcendental.
Quoting Astrophel
Person A says that this couch is good for sitting on. Person B also says that this couch is good for sitting on. Person C says that this couch is not good for sitting on.
Whether the couch is good for sitting on or not is contingent on who sits on it.
The question is, who in practice decides whether the essence of the couch is good or bad, regardless of being sat upon?
===============================================================================
Quoting Astrophel
Person A says that this Derain has an aesthetic. Person B also says that this Derain has an aesthetic. Person C says that this Derain doesn't have an aesthetic.
Whether this Derain has an aesthetic or not is contingent on who is looking at it.
The question is, who in practice decides whether this Derain has the essence of being aesthetic, regardless of who is looking at it?
===============================================================================
Quoting Astrophel
In Kant's Transcendental Idealism, we are able to cognize appearances in our sensibilities as phenomena, but we can never cognize things as they are in themselves, things-in-themselves.
The ability to cognize things-in-themselves would be transcendent.
We can cognize the appearance of something, something as it appears to us, but we cannot cognize the essence of something, something as it is in itself
We can cognize that the couch is good, as it appears to us, in being comfortable to sit on, but we can never cognize that the couch is good, as it is in itself, its essence.
We can experience an aesthetic, and we can experience the colour red. Both stand alone in the mind, in that an aesthetic experience is distinct from the experience of the colour red. Both can only result from phenomenological appearances in our sensibilities. Both the aesthetic experience and the experience of the colour red are contingent on the particular person and particular phenomena.
We experience something, such as a painting, music, dance or literature, which we may find aesthetic. These experiences will be spatially or temporally extended. We may or may not discover an aesthetic in the whole relationship between these extended parts. For example, we may experience an aesthetic in the phenomenological spatial relationship between the shapes and colours of a Derain painting.
But why do we have an aesthetic experience when we perceive a whole that has certain relationships between certain parts? Is this really mysterious?
We hear the sound of a fingernail scarping across a blackboard and physically shiver with visceral dislike, and more than likely even cringe at the thought. We see a Derain and may have an aesthetic experience.
Experiencing an aesthetic is a natural consequence of a physical human interacting with a physical world, as falling to the ground is a natural consequence of a physical apple interacting with a physical world.
An aesthetic experience may be mysterious, but no more mysterious than any of our experiences. No more mysterious than feeling pain when stung by a wasp, seeing the colour red when looking at a wavelength of 700nm, tasting something sweet when eating an apple or smelling something acrid because of a bonfire.
An aesthetic experience is no more mysterious that experiencing the colour red, both not unexpected natural consequences of a physical body existing within a physical world.
I was hoping, by my mention of shoe-tying and book-reading, you might note that my position has always been that humans generally think in images.
If one speaks to himself, how does he know what to say?
If to think is to speak to oneself, why not just say one thinks to himself?
What seems like the proverbial voice in your head is merely extant experience doing its thing, taking up the time when the cognitive part of the system recognizes its only repeating itself.
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Quoting Astrophel
This, here, is thinking, and your idea that whats beneath thinking is impossible to talk about. I would extend that to your question, what is logic. Other than bare definition, whats beneath logic, is impossible to talk about.
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Quoting Astrophel
Im not sure what you mean by transcendental thinking. All transcendental is a priori and belongs to reason but thinking both a posteriori and a priori belongs to understanding. In the former is the complete determination of all things in general; in the latter is the determination of one thing at a time. It is by the transcendental substratum for the determination of all things, are given the rules for the possibility of determining particular things. The completely determined in general is an idea; the completely determined in particular is the ding an sich, neither of which is a possible experience.
If we were in the weeds before, were damn near being choked out by them now.
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Quoting Astrophel
I dont know what affectivity is. What does it mean for ethics to have an essence?
It depends on how you are thinking about what "the world" is. If you are referring to the naturalist view science takes, then I would disagree, for science and its naturalism presupposes Kant's world. A geneticist calls it a DNA molecule, while Kant calls it sensory intuitions synthetically taken up by concepts. Both are right, let's say, but Kant;s is more basic, an analysis of the presuppositions science rests on. For Kant, nature is representation, and this means it is not reality, but only empirical reality.
Nature is certainly not irreducible because when we conceive of what nature is, we find Kant and phenomenology "beneath" what the naturalists can say.
The case for what? Well, it is the case that this stone cannot move itself. It must be moved by something else, and this holds true by necessity, so how can I know this apodicticity that is IN the stone when the stone stands outside of the logic produced in my mental affairs? It MUST be that the stone is not simply out there in a world that is independent of my mental affairs. Rather, there must be a relation that binds the two. Kant proves this in a transcendental deduction, but because it is only about this logical apriority, he misses the need for a transcendental deduction of the totality of experience. I said this earlier, and it is my take on the matter.
You might find Eugene Fink's first lines of his Cartesian Meditations interesting. He writes:
[i]Instead of inquiring into the being of the world, as does traditional "philosophy" dom inated by the dogmatism of the natural attitude, or, where inquiry is not satisfied with that, instead of soaring up over the world "speculatively," we, in a truly "Copernican revolution," have broken through the confinement of the natural attitude, as the horizon of all our human possibilities for acting and theorizing,
and have thrust forward into the dimension of origin for all being, into the constitutive source of the world, into the sphere of transcendental subjectivity.[/i]
Entirely up to you, but Husserl writes his Cartesian Meditations and gives Fink the final chapter, and you might find the whole thing worthy of reading. Husserl/Fink is a neo Kantian (hence, the reference to the Copernican Revolution) but his "revolution" is more radical.
Quoting Mww
But his Deduction is analogized to a quid juris legal affair, which has "no clear legal title, sufficient to justify their* employment, being obtainable either from experience or from reason." The absence of a clear title means a kind of shot in the dark, for there is no hope of a determinate conclusion. A bit like a cosmologist taking a stab at what there was prior to the big bang, only much worse,
Quoting Mww
But really, all one can every say about these pure forms is that they cannot be spoken of. The term 'exist' itself is concept; what isn't? and thus it gives us a principle of subsumption for particulars. and thus conceived in the very disclosure possibilities that it itself presupposes. Kant knew this. No one can talk about noumena existing. The entire Critique is, as Derrida put it, under erasure, or as Wittgenstein put it, nonsense.
But I don't think it's nonsense at all because I don't think transcendence belongs to logical extravagance alone, nor is it rationalistic overreach. Kant simply forgot, typical of mathameticians and logicians, thta we exit.
You can say this, that when you are not thinking of a pot and you see and know what it is you are not actualizing the empirical concept 'pot' but ignoring it, at least until, someone says, hand me that pot! and you explicitly hear the word. But consider that the whole culture you live and breathe in has its genesis in language. This was the point about General Motors. Consider what Genera Motors IS. It's not like a cat or a canary or this book such that you can make philosophical issues of body and mind, material and mental, physical and spiritual, and so on. There is none of that "dualism" here, so when we say, think, whatever, what GM IS, we don't have, in the reductive analysis, any ontological difference of this kind. Then what can one say about GM ontologically? If you're Kant, you say it is a diffuse and structured body of conceptuality pragmatically conceived. 'GM' as a concept has no sensory intuitions in its ontology, but when philosophy does its rationalist reduction, it lands where there are, on people, computers, board rooms, chairs and the rest. GM as such doesn't really exist at all outside this contrived context; OTOH, hard to imagine something like this not "existing"---it's in the news, millions are talking about it, employs thousands, has global connectedness, etc.
Here is where I leave Kant, or, I left him much earlier but now do so explcitly. It might be interesting to see how he could talk about this, but I don't have time for radical ontological rationalism in trying to understand this world. The point I am making is that GM's presence in our everyday lives is a pragmatic language construction, and this is no different from empirical concepts themselves: Everything we "are" and everything we encounter is pragmatically conceived. This is the structure of time itself.
Is it that once there was no word for anything? Or that language was there at the very beginning, and as our distant ancestors evolved, so did language? I am reading Barnett Newman's The Sublime Is Now, and he writes
[i]The human in language is literature,
not communication. Man's first cry
was a song. Man's first address to a
neighbor was a cry of power and
solemn weakness, not a request for
a drink of water. Even the animal
makes a futile attempt at poetry.
Ornithologists explain the cock's crow
as an ecstatic outburst of his power.[/i]
I picked this up in a discussion about Heidegger, who understands language to be much deeper in the constitution of our existence. Language erupts, if you will, out of the primordiality of an overwhelming world, and evolves into religion and philosophy as it seeks to understand and speak this primordiality.
Wittgenstein would say yes, at least in the Tractatus (which he says, paradoxically, is nonsense!). I "see" logic in judgments like, It won't rain unless there are clouds, and in universal statements like, All Catholics believe Jesus is God's son, but the genesis of this structure cannot be witnessed. As Witt said, to do so would be to draw a line between the logic as shown and the explanatory or meta language used to say what it is. BUt this metalanguage would then need the same meta analysis, and so on. This is the paradox of language and metaphysics. Where did all this talk about God come from? From something that was already there, in the language, like constructions of God's omnipotence, omniscience and the rest: just ampilfications of the familiar.
This is why the positivists loved Wittgenstein. He destroyed metaphysics in a simple stroke of well reasoned thought. But they never read Heidegger. Husserl announced that phenomenology is the REAL positivism. I think he is right.
Quoting Mww
The idea is this: Kant looks at experience and "observes" Aristotle's logical structures. So he identifies logical structures and ask about their genesis---but why is the palpable world not given the same due? Logic is just "there" and we call it apriori because of the necessity of it. But the full totality of our existence is no different in the original evidential provocation. To see this, one turns to Descartes and Hussel's Cartesian approach: Descartes wanted certainty to ground the world in what it is, and he found this in the cogito. To make hundreds of pages short: the cogito cannot be what it is without its object, and so the certainty of the object is necessarily is just as necessary as the cogito because consciousness is always about something. If the cogito is necessarily what it is, then the world the cogito acknowledges is as well. To put is in Kant's language, sensory intuitions are just as necessary as the logic that is "filled" by them. Of course, calling it sensory intuitions is just dismissive.
What IS this feeling of misery of delight? What IS this curiosity, questioning, body of eyes, nose and skin, perceptual engagement of care, intent, desire; in short, what does it mean to BE here, for a person's whole existence to BE? This question has far more gravitas then pure reason can ever begin to have, and it is simply there, as logic is, seeking, if you will, its transcendental ground.
See Max Scheler or Von Hildebrandt, the German phenomenologists: It is value, importance itself that is the final analytic of our existence. Pure form literally has no value. Kant was important because he put all eyes on subjectivity, but then he blew subjectivity out of existence. You might find Michel Henry's critique of Kant amusing. The length is I think worthy (my underlines):
[i]How can one not be struck by this extraordinary
conceptual situation: it is precisely with Kant, who
relates the Being of all beings to the Subject, that the
Subject becomes the object of a radical dispute which
denies it all possible Being. Or to put it anothey way: it
is at the very moment when philosophy sees itself clearly
as a philosophy of the subject that the foundation on
which it explicitly and thematically bases itself, and
which it systematically endeavours to elaborate, escapes
it and, slipping from its grasp, tips over into the void of
inanity.
One cannot forget in effect how the rich developments of the
Analytic end up, like a torrent which
suddenly dries up, lost in the desert of the Dialectic.
Now this peculiar turning of the positive into the
negative happens [u]when the Being of the subject itself
comes into question, when it is a matter of knowing if
such a subject exists and, if so, what it might be. The
Critique of the Paralogism of Rational Psychology in
fact radically critiques the Being of this subject in such a
way that anything one might advance about this Being
includes a paralogism, so that if, in spite of everything, it
must be spoken about, one can say only that it is an
"intellectual representation".[/u]
Which means that '~ think" (since we are dealing here
with the cogito) is equal to "I represent to myself that I
think". Which means that the Being of the subject is to
be classed as the object of a representation, an object
which on the one hand presupposes this subject, and on
the other never contains by itself, insofar as it is
represented, the reality[/i]
A hand cannot grasp itself, but nevertheless, is proof of an external world, as Moore wrote in Proof of an External World
In addition, as Descartes might have said, "I think about my hand, therefore I am".
In fact, it seems that my hand not only proves my existence but also that of the external world.
Not the point at issue, if you read the post I responded to.
The point at issue is Michel Henry's problem with Kant's Transcendental idealism which Henry characterises as "I represent to myself that I think"
This is a combination of Descartes "I think, therefore I am" and Kant's Transcendental Idealism.
To think means thinking about something. Therefore, Descartes might have said "I think about my hand, therefore I am".
Within Kant's Transcendental Idealism, when the subject encounters a hand, the subject recognizes the hand as an object of experience, not as it is in itself, but as it appears within the limitations that the Categories have imposed on it.
Therefore, Kant might have said "I think about my hand as an object of experience, not as it is in itself, but as it appears within the limitations that the Categories have imposed on it"
Kant might have more simply said "I think about a representation"
It is certainly not the case as Henry suggests that Kant is saying "I represent to myself that I think".
But you move too quickly. Not the external world, but externality itself is a dimension of perceptual event and the perceptual event is a dimension of externality. They are one! as witnessed IN the milieu of the subject.
I think this is right. The "myself" as a transcendental Unity of Apperception is entirely "absent". What Henry IS going to say is that Kant's is a thorough reduction to representation, and therefore all is lost, knowledge of the world and of oneself. This is going to inspire the positivists, as well as the idealists, ironically.
Henry holds that when phenomenology is taken to its only possible telos, and the reduction reveals to one the bare presence of existence. Husserl is right, and one's consciousness and the object cannot be separated (though objects come and go, and vary in nature). They are a singularity! And therefore the search for apriority sought by Kant is now materialized in the actuality . And this is, I believe, momentous. For now philosophy is free to discuss this unity. A cup IS the unity of what was once called into question in a division between mind and body, thought and thing, and so forth. The cup Is the affectivity, the anticipation, the rational structure, all of the "secondary qualities", and so on, as well as beyond perceptual grasp, that is, transcendence; or better, transcendence itself is IN the unity; the unity is itself transcendence. Note that when one says the cup exists, the ground for this existence cannot come from the cup as a thing that transcends consciousness (science), for this makes existence completely alien to understanding. The ground must lie in the existence of one's own agency that is always already in the immediacy of the apprehending of the cup.
Descartes was right in the essential method: it is a kind of apophatic method of removing all that stands outside certainty to see what remains, and one can, Kant shows in explicit detail, doubt everything, even thought itself, and this will take some very interesting twists and turns in post modern thinking, but where Descartes' reduction finds the cogito, Henry, following Husserl, sees that this is plainly absurd, for one cannot even imagine thought unbound, in its nature, to the world. There is no such thing as a disembodied thought, and it is not, "I think, therefore I am," but, "I am in a world, therefore I am." This is the beginning for apodictic affirmation of the world, and it puts all thoughts of dualism to rest, because such things only follow AFTER the foundational affirmation. Being-in-the-world is first, primordial.
To me, phenomenology inevitably becomes a mysticism. I mean you end up with a transcendental mystery about your own existence, others, too, but indirectly. The Buddhist is the quintessential phenomenologist.
The lament, no clear legal title sufficient to justify their employment, being obtainable from experience or reason, was a slam on Hume, who posited mere constant conjunction of sense to experience on the one hand, and his rejection of pure a priori conceptions of reason entirely, on the other.
It is that the categories are analogized to a quid juris deduction, or, which is the same thing, it is that a sufficient warrant, a clear right, that the categories are the necessary conditions, not for experience, but for the invocation for synthesis in understanding of the sense of a thing to the cognition of it, and THAT being the logical necessity for experience.
It seems to me by your words, youre saying the categories have no clear right to do what Kant intended for them, re:, his deduction of them is suspect, or downright illegitimate, therefore they have no sufficient warrant for their employment.
Quoting Astrophel
The certainty isnt in the stone, its in the truth of the necessity, which is not outside the logic of my mental affairs.
Quoting Astrophel
The stone is not; that which is represented by the word stone, very much is simply out there, independent of my mental affairs. Stone is from those very affairs.
Quoting Astrophel
There is a relation, but not between the thing out there and my mental affairs with respect to it. The relation binds, through synthesis, the phenomena of intuition in sensibility to the logic of cognition in understanding. The ground for that function of synthesis, is imagination, the rules by which all synthesis abides regarding empirical content, are the categories.
Quoting Astrophel
If he thought there was a need for it, wouldnt he have included it in what hed already said was a completed metaphysical system? Besides, the pertinent fundamental transcendental deduction concerns the possibility of experience, the totality of each being no more than just itself, and of course, the totality of experience in general, is unintelligible.
Totality of experience is not a thing to which transcendental deductions can apply, but rather, represents an aggregate of individual things, to each of which such deductions would apply. In the thought of them. Experience is merely an end, given from a certain methodological means, hence, being an end, or, object of, is not itself subjected to, the means.
Why is there a need, and what form would restitution for that need take?
I mean, it took him ten years and 700-odd pages to construct what he thought he needed, so it seems pretty ungracious to suggest later that he forgot something. I know Im barely smart enough to understand what he did, but Im certainly not smart enough to question what he should have done.
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Quoting Astrophel
So all youre saying is that he didnt really deduce anything, when he states for the record that transcendental deductions are . an examination of the manner in which conceptions can apply à priori to objects , which appears to presuppose the conceptions being applied.
If appearance tells me a thing exists, logic tells me its existence is necessary. I have no need to deduce any of those pure conceptions justifying my logic, beyond the authority they impose on my thinking. This is what his successors meant by telling us all about what we couldnt talk about. It isnt and never was what we cant; its because there no need.
Quoting Astrophel
The term exist is a conception, yes, which can be predicated of things. Existence gives the principle of subsumption for particular things as a condition for them, yet can never be itself a predicate. It follows that the criteria for a pure conception, is that it is always the subject of a proposition and from which is given a principle in relation to time, and cannot be a predicate in the cognition of things. Existence is, therefore, not just a conception, but a pure conception.
In much the same way is space a conception. But insofar as space is the condition of the sensing of things rather than the thinking of them, it is not a pure conception, but instead, a pure intuition, holding to the same transcendental manner of applying a priori to objects but not contained in them.
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Quoting Astrophel
Ok, so if I see a thing and know what it is, thats called experience and makes explicit the thing I see has run the full gamut of cognition. It follows that if Im seeing a pot, I must be thinking the concept in order to know what Im seeing this time conforms to the thing I saw at some antecedent time and by which I first knew that thing as a pot. If I see and know a thing I must have actualized the concept.
On the other hand, what do I care about not actualizing a concept when Im not thinking about some thing? I can almost guarantee Im NOT thinking about a hellava lot more things than I am.
When Im looking at and knowing a pot, and the guy says frying pan .why is it that I dont hand him the pot? I didnt hand him the pot only because what I heard him say doesnt sound like the name of what I see? Wouldnt I have to actualize both concepts, think the thing belonging to this sound and think the thing belonging to that sound, in order to judge whether or not the sound I heard properly represents the thing I see?
If I have to actualize concepts for the relations of different sounds, why wouldnt I have to actualize concepts in the relations of what I know?
Quoting Astrophel
Thats my opinion.
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Quoting Astrophel
The world is not given the same logical structure because we dont know enough about it. Still, what we do know about it can be said to demonstrate logical structure in its relations to us, the simplest being near or far.
The genesis of logical structure is in us, and it is impossible that we do not know that very structure which we construct for ourselves, the simplest of that being A = A.
The world is just there, and we determine for ourselves how it is to be understood. Just because we say roses are red doesnt indicate the impossibility that they be anything else, but only that they are that for us. By the same token, if the rose is red regardless of what we say, it is red necessarily. Our intelligence is not equipped to say which is the case.
[quote=Wikipedia]Edmund Husserl, the founder of Phenomenology, wrote that "I could not tear myself away" while reading the Buddhist Sutta Pitaka in the German translation of Karl Eugen Neumann.[35][36] Husserl held that the Buddha's method as he understood it was very similar to his own. Eugen Fink, who was Husserl's chief assistant and whom Husserl considered to be his most trusted interpreter said that: "the various phases of Buddhistic self-discipline were essentially phases of phenomenological reduction."[/quote]
Kant did not believe that everything must be reduced to representation.
In his Refutation of Idealism CPR B275, he concludes that both time determination and determination of the self in time requires us to posit the existence of a thing outside us.
This is in opposition to both Berkeley, who denies the possibility of spatial objects, and Descartes, in that we can only know the mind.
===============================================================================
Quoting Astrophel
From SEP - Notes to Seventeenth-Century Theories of Consciousness
Descartes said that there were no thoughts about which we are unconscious. In addition, he said that whilst the object of perception may be doubted, the perception itself cannot be doubted.
However, there is an academic dispute whether Descartes believed that a thought can be non-intentional.
Yes he did.
Quoting RussellA
This is an issue. If I think, then the thought has content. It is never stand alone thinking, and if one is thinking about some object---a stone, a cloud, another thought, a feeling, whatever, then that object is an inherent part of the apodictic affirmation. Descartes cogito is an inherent affirmation of the world's "objects", physical or otherwise.
Quoting RussellA
The proof would be in the Meditations. But he did, after all, have to bring in impossibility of God to deceive to affirm everything else. I am saying (following my current crush, Michel Henry) that the cogito, "I think" is an abstraction from the object/consciousness unity.
Quoting Mww
Right. That is what it amounts to. Kant knew full well that there are no categories. They're noumenal.
Quoting Mww
Of course it is. What is the stone? It IS sensate intuitions and concepts. And so the stone IS whatever the concept is, and the concept IS its apriori structure. You look out at the horizon of things in your back yard and what do you "see" that is not this? The stone is an intuitive/conceptual construct, and if you remove all perceptual presence, the stone is no longer there. Tree falling in the forest? If no one is there: no tree, no noise, no falling, no forest.
Quoting Mww
Well, you may think this, but Kant doesn't. Being "simply out there" is, where, in space? But read the transcendental aesthetic: Space is an apriori for of intuition.
Quoting Mww
The thing out there IS your mental affairs. Imagination refers to time. See the deduction, which is a time analysis, and time is the foundation for mental affairs. There is no thing "out there" for out there is an apriori form of intuition.
Quoting Mww
Really? It is ungracious to critique the Critique?? Can I talk about Plato? Kant' critiqued Hume, who awoke him from his dogmatic slumber.....but that was wrong??
He did not think about a critique of being-in-the-world because he didn't think of it. Heidegger did, leaning on Kant. That is the way it works. Kant's was a critique, if you will, of Aristotle, Leibniz, Locke, Hume and the rest
You think my critical comments are MINE? I read phenomenology, Hegel through the post-post Heideggerians, which is essentially a response to Kant, or better, a moving forth with and from Kant into new horizons. For the next month I will be reading Jean Luc Marion on Givenness. He follows Levinas et al, who follows Husserl, criticizes Heidegger, and is inspired by Kierkegaard who criticizes Hegel, and so on. Marion is fascinating, but one will not understand a word if they haven't read Heidegger or Husserl.
It all builds into body of inquiry and thought, and for the phenomenologists, it takes one to that terminal point where language meets itself in the world. See Blanchot. You might want to read his Thomas the Obscure, and his Space of Literature and The Infinite Conversation. Insane at first, but keep at it, and you finally see what they (Beckett and others) are doing, and it is Kant's work that makes this all possible, because his rationalism is so brilliant and well conceived, he opened a new door to philosophy: the door to critiquing Kant!
And saying you are not smart enough is like you are begging to be told what to think. I certainly don't understand the entire Critique, few do. Only Kant scholars, and they are mostly just, well, scholarly, meaning they have good memories, and perhaps are analytically and synthetically able, but that doesn't mean they have deep insight.
Kant didn't understand Kant perfectly well because he at once denied metaphysics and did this in a grand metaphysical thesis. Put philosophy in the hands of a logician, and you will get a thesis about logic and meaning will be treated accordingly. But the attempt to discuss the nature of logic IN a logically structured language setting is blatant question begging, that is, it assumes what needs to be shown.
Quoting Mww
But it IS that you can't, simply because to do so would require the very categorical functions in need of explaining. But the need for doing this is that it takes philosophy to a threshold: a place where language and its logic confront language and its logic. Language has been very useful in dealing with the world, but metaphysics has been an awful matter to clear up, what with Platonism, Christian theology, rationalism, empiricism, and a lot of just bad metaphysics in ethics, epistemology/ontology, and so on. Kant takes the very structure of reason itself and declares a speed limit, a point where logic cannot go, and this is beyond its own representational delimitations.
But then, metaphysics still beckons! The categories are this: that which cannot be though in itself, but thought nevertheless IN representational possibilities. It has to be understood that whenever one says anything, the categories are presupposed, and so the "saying" cannot be about these. They belong to metaphysics, but you could say "good" metaphysics, because...consider this passage from the Dialectic:
[i]It is therefore correct to
say that the senses do not err not
because they always judge rightly but because they do not
judge at all. Truth and error, therefore, and consequently also
illusion as leading to error, are only to be found in the judgment,
i.e. only in the relation of the object to our understanding.
In any knowledge which completely accords with the laws
of understanding there is no error.[u]In a representation of the A 294
senses as containing no judgment whatsoever there is also
no error. No natural force can of itself deviate from its own
laws.[/u] Thus neither the understanding by itself (uninfluenced
by another cause), nor the senses by themselves, would fall
into error.[/i]
Do you notice something a bit fishy here? If the senses do not err because they do not judge at all, then isn't this an admission that the sense qua sense is of the same ontological status is noumena? That is, an absolute? He is right, sensory intuitions are not mistakenly acknowledged, but just because they are acknowledged in the understanding leaves open the question, how is it that they are acknowledged at all AS SUCH? You can say this can only be in the understanding and so to speak at all of sensory intuitions one is thus bound categorically, but this is not what he is saying, or is it? What I am saying above here, is that the pure concepts are "good metaphysics" because it is not a lot of dogmatic foolishness, but is grounded on the way language itself offers its own structure up to itself for review. What you get is a "representational" view of what it is for things to be representations, and it can never get beyond this because it will always be thought begetting thought. And this just has to be accepted....
UNLESS, of course, we take Kant at his word, and the sensory intuitions do not err. And the same must be said about the pathos, or the emotions, or the affectivity (which I choose). There is a fascinating piece of reasoning here. I can only apprehend such things, which cannot be in error, IN the understanding (and hence the categorical form); however, when I do this, I am faced with something that lies outside this categorical condition, even though it is beheld IN it, the sight, the smell, the music, the love, the suffering, and so on. Kant wants to say that no matter what, the content is conditioned apriori, and we can accept this, say, but this does not alter the nature of the content as what it is; it merely says that it must have this formal structure that apprehends it. The affective dimension of our existence remains what it is, and this presence is unerringly before us.
By Cartesian standards, this makes the sensory intuitions as well as anything at all that "appears" before us, a headache, a heartbreak, a delicious desire, and so on, an apodictic foundation for ontology. Not the categories, but the content are "pure" in their being there, failing to be acknowledged for what they truly are because judgment about them is clouded by daily life entanglements and sciences presumptions.
Note that this apodicticity, that of the affectivity, the kind of thing Kant explicitly wants to be excluded from the essence of our existence, is the palpable real's essence, not the essence of vacuous reason.
Quoting Mww
If you want to think like Kant, okay. But really? Existence is just a principle on the impossible side of phenomena? This makes existence something OTHER than the physical imposition of that tree in my perceptual encounter. IF this exhausts what existence IS, then you should not wonder why Kant' is so assailable. Not that the apprehension of a tree contains no logicality in the judgment about it, but that existence is (putting Heidegger aside) blunt confrontation with the world like a baseball bat coming hard down on one's knees, or the delicate and nuanced feel of silk to the touch, or the agony of love lost, or..... Existence is what issues from the presence of the world as it is present, as it IS, and certainly not from some distant noumenal category of pure reason.
No Kant never thought of this. He was too busy reducing the world to thought qua thought. Again, not that he was wrong at all. But that the rationalism that dominates his thesis is wrong if it is meant to be exhaustive in its determination as to what it is to be human.
Quoting Mww
I'll follow this bit by bit:
The first paragraph: but when you see an object, you generally are not "thinking the concept" but rather, the recognition is spontaneous. But yes, your concepts are temporal in nature, and it is the past informing the present. Husserl calls this predelineation: you walk into an environment like a kitchen or a classroom, whatever, and you already know everything, and can instantly produce language that is contextualized in ways that agree with everyone else. It only becomes explicit if it is called upon to be so, as when someone asks you where you bought that pot. But the familiarity hovers, like a halo, speaking phenomenologically, or an aura, such that when your glance turns to a spatula, and a new set of languages possibilities come into play implicitly, and things are ready to hand to deal with. Actualized, as you say.
When you are not thinking about a spatula, you have not entered into this region of possible thought, and at that time, you don't occurrently care. You do, however, predispositionally care, such that when such an environment comes into play, things are there and ready to hand. True, at any given moment, what you are not regionally taking up is vastly more than what you are. Heidegger calls this general body of possibilities das man, "the they".
So why is it problematic that you would have more than one concept in play at once? Actualizing a concept can be a mere glance as you write a letter, check the time, and shoo a fly away. The fly is familiar and its presence temporally predelineated, hence the spontaneous shooing, and if one comes up to you and inquires about the fly, the language is there, ready to hand. This is Heidegger's "space". Very different from things physically near and far. Things are near when their relevance hovers close by, as when you think of your good friend and not the glasses on your nose: the friend is much "closer" than your glasses. You see his point: it is rare that you are not engaged in-the-world, and this engagement is YOU, your dasein, your being there. Language is what discloses the world to you, so environments are not spatial in the Kantian sense at all, for your existence is not this kind of spatiality. Your "space" is on of meanings, as you slip in and out of regional contexts. Here I am, sitting here, a stray thought occurs, the relief I finished my taxes, then I think about how little I made this year, and so on. These are "spatial" movements for Heidegger, and this movement into some context he calls deseverance.
Of course, you do actualize relations between sound as well as between concepts. I must be missing something.
Quoting Mww
I am sure there was a time when there was no language. But the quote by Barnet Newman tries to show that language is truly primordial, found in the squawks and shrill cries of animals. The way this ws taken up was in a conversation about the depths of subjectivity and language. You might want to read this short piece, The Sublime Is Now.
Quoting Mww
This I'll have to address later, when I return from my trip abroad.
Kant may be a Representationalist, but not everything can be reduced to a representation. Is his space and time a representation? Are his Categories representations?
In the CPR B275 he writes that his perception of time is only possible because of it is not being represented.
As regards the Categories, for example, in the quantity of unity, there is one blue object. In the quantity of plurality, some objects are blue. In the quantity of totality, all the objects are blue. A Category is needed for us to cognize that within a phenomena there is one blue object. Within the phenomena of shapes and colours is a representation of one blue object. The Category can synthesise a manifold of experiences that represent one blue object, but the Category itself cannot be a representation, otherwise there would be no solid ground for our cognitions. If the Category was a representation, what is it representing?
As Wittgenstein needs certain hinge propositions, Kant also needs a ground. In order to represent, representation needs a ground that is itself not a representation, and for Kant this ground is space, time and the Categories.
The SEP article Notes to Seventeenth-Century Theories of Consciousness writes that there is some dispute whether Descartes believed that there were non-intentional thoughts.
For example, it is conceivable that consciousness of a thought is prior to the thought's intentionality.
One problem about the idea that thoughts must be of something, such as I think of the pain of a wasp sting, I think of a tree, I think of tomorrow or I think of my relatives, is that these thoughts are contingent on what is being thought about, thereby losing any necessary independent identity of the self. A self independent of whatever thoughts it may have.
Perhaps enlightenment is brought to this considering that when certainty is upon one, in some experience or other, it is not the logicality that is insisting, but the world. It is not logic that determines meaningful apriority; it is the existential grounding of the pathos, the affectivity, the value dimension of engagement, that makes this radical affirmation. This is something Kant clearly did not understand. Being in the world is inherently moral/aesthetic, and you find this in Dewey (ARt as Experience, and elsewhere), though Dewey was no metaphysician, Scheler, Von Hildebrandt; and it is in this that the world is self affirming, self evidencing apiori.
To say consciousnss of a thought is prior to thought's intentionality means that IN the intentional structure there is an inherent self consciousness. Husserl argued like this and that famous essay Sartre wrote, the Transcendence of the Ego, argued against it, because it impeded freedom. I'd have to read about this again to remind me of how this goes.
Thought must be OF something: Is a sprained ankle intentional? I like hagen dasz, but the noesis of this, the liking regard for it, this can be isolated from noema. How about just being happy? Sitting and doing nothing like a Buddhist, altogether absent of "something"? This is one complaint. Another is that it violates the simplicity of encountering objects in the absolute simplicity of the pure phenomenological. This is Michel Henry, and I think he is right. When the epoche of Husserl is done down to the wire, so to speak, and the conscious encounter is absent of all interpretative impositions, the world looms large in it bare presence of Being.
Of course, this gets rather technical and alien to common sense. Then again, this is what happens when inquiry goes down that rabbit hole.
But one has to step back from it all. There is no concept that is not representational, and thus, all talk about what is non representational is always already represntational. Kant knew this. One cannot speak of the apriori intuition of space and be free the hold the categories have on experience and meaning. One "understands" the Transcendental Aesthetic, but what is it to understand? This is inherently bound to the synthetic function of the concept of 'space' when it is deployed in discussion. This is the upshot of Kantian thinking: There is NOTHING non representational available to human understanding. We stand only in appearance, and the noumenal reality is impossibe to even conceive (though the MUST be something?? Can this even be said? Witt said no).
Quoting RussellA
I guess the above is saying that a 'category', in our delimited world, is a representation of a representation, or a representation of what representations are, an appearing thesis of the appearing of phenomena all tightly bound within appearances. To speak AT ALL about anything, this can never penetrate beyond what is merely given, and you can see why Kant is considered the destroyer of religion: Just reducible to an extravagance ofo thought whereby ideas are constructed out of the thin air of concepts without intuitions.
Quoting RussellA
Of course. But how does one speak of such a ground in the very structure of ground itself?; that which is in need of being grounded cannot be offered as the essential ground itself, and this is what you get when you write the Critique of Pure Reason.
Quoting Astrophel
The world is not inherently moral/aesthetic, so why should being in the world be inherently moral/aesthetic.
Quoting Astrophel
Yes, it is not immediately obvious who is right.
Quoting Astrophel
It is possible just to be happy without being happy about something, so why is it not possible to have a thought without having a thought about something?
Quoting Astrophel
This cannot be the case, as this would lead into an infinite regression, which we know is not the case.
Quoting Astrophel
That is why it is transcendental.
Quoting Astrophel
But we do! So it must be possible.
Quoting Mww
Quoting Astrophel
In the first, I am to suppose there is a movable object. In the second I am to suppose the said movable object is sensate intuition and concepts. Which leaves me to wonder .how are sensate intuitions and concepts movable?
Having exposed the, dare I say, grotesque!!!, categorical error, it follows from the fact that all knowledge, and antecedently all a priori principles by which empirical knowledge is possible, resides in me, the certainty an object of whatever name cannot move itself but must be moved by something else, which is a representation of one such a priori principle, must also reside in me, and not in that object to which the principle merely applies.
Quoting Astrophel
Precisely the categorical error. Without perceptual presence of things, and forthcoming experience, it can only be a priori that I still know with certainty nothing in space moves itself.
Quoting Astrophel
Oh, Im pretty sure he thinks, and is trying desperately to impress upon the rest of us, simply out there indicates simply not in here. I didnt mention space, only referring to that which must be .something external to me, to which I must look upon myself as being related , and that by means of the logic intrinsic to my mental affairs.
Quoting Astrophel
Oh dear. The thing out there is nothing but the appearance to, the effect on, the occassion for, my mental affairs, but is not them, .for, otherwise, we should require to affirm the existence of an appearance, without something that appearswhich would be absurd.
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Quoting Astrophel
Quoting Mww
Since when is ungracious to suggest the same as ungracious to critique? As long as weve been here weve both been critiquing the Critique, but only one of us suggests a flaw in the memory of its author. Without knowing the totality of what he knew, what could possibly be said about what he forgot?
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Quoting Astrophel
Correct. Intuition cannot think, understanding cannot intuit
Quoting Astrophel
When I see, or perceive by any sense, the affect on my senses is immediate. So I would only say the recognition my senses have of been affected, re: sensation, is simultaneous with such appearance. The spontaneity of concepts takes place in understanding, and so has nothing to do with when I see an object.
If it is me that is thinking the concept, does it make any difference to then say it is me recognizing the spontaneity by which the concept is thought?
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Have a good trip.
Well, that is a big issue. I hold that the world is most emphatically inherently moral. Where Kant argued from the world to pure reason's transcendental nature, I argue from value to pure value's transcedental nature. Trouble with Kant is that the formal exposition of judgment is entirely empty of content, a reductive analysis to nothing at all, for what is form qua form? What is, say, modus ponens sans the p's and q's that make for its demonstration? Nothing.
But the same metaphysical provocation exists for ethics, that is, the question as to its ground, and the reductive attempt to isolate this ground. What is ethics? leads inquiry to metaethical arguments, where Kant's were metalogical. Metaethical questions ask about the nature or essence of ethics, and here we discover value, or, the bonum and the malum, and here were not abstractly penetrating abstractions in logic, but existential actualities that constitute the meaning of our existence.
Note how Kant moves to rationality to explain duty, a good will, and the infamous categorical imperative. How he could do this rests solely with, in terms of motivation, an absence of affectivity in his own hyper rational mentality. He was a sociopath, but the good kind.
Quoting RussellA
If you are interested, you might find Michel Henry's phenomenology interesting. See this cup on the table. In the immediacy of the apprehension, there is no intentionality that intrudes into the interface. There is no interface, only the phenomenological unity, which is a transcendental primordiality. Phenomenology leads to one place, existential transcendence, and the most salient feature here is the meta ethical and the meta aesthetic, evidenced in the value dimension of everydayness, the briuses and abrasions, the tragedies and the ecstasies. A place Kant simply did not have the experiential constitution to acknowledge.
As to who is right, the question then goes to agency, and this, as Wayfarer pointed out, cannot be observed. One can, however, do as Heidegger did, which practice gelassenheit, a kind of meditative thinking in which one yields as one thinks, rather than imposing on the world what one already thinks. A kind of meditation that allows the world to "speak".
Quoting RussellA
Being happy is a state, but a thought is always the world taken AS something. The word 'happy' is a reference, while being happy is not.
Quoting RussellA
You mean if talk about Kant's categories is just representational talk about representations, then that, too, is representational talk, and so forth. But it is a fabricated regression, willfully produced. Like saying one can think a thought, then think a thought about that thought, etc; or a chicken comes from an egg which comes form a chicken, etc.; and there is certainly regression here, but it is harmless. If to think about the categories is itself an application of the categories (which it is. Kant, of course, was well aware) simply because to think at all is categorical (which is the point) then the universal quantification, "all thought is categorical" (that is, is transcendentally structured apriori) is the end to the regression.
Quoting RussellA
That is why God, the soul and freedom are dialectical errors. Kant's doesn't think his deduction is an error, but that it has a necessary noumenal correlate.
I do get confused by Kant's position on this, though. I would have to spend time with the Critique to work through this. But presently, I don't see how there is a way out if this. The pure categories are just as in error as those taboo metaphysical ideas of the Transcendental Dialectic.
Quoting RussellA
It certainly is possible, but it is possible only within the very language possiblities that presuppose the categories. This is the matter. It is assuming in the conclusion something that has to be demonstrated. Kant's conclusion is that there is a transcendental ground for all logic but what is this transcendental ground? It is transcendental, so it cannot stand for anything that is inferentially derived from what is not transcendental.
Language cannot stand as its own metalanguage.
Thanks! It was very good, putting aside the covid I had for a week. I don't think when I die I would like to cough myself to death, as so many of those that came before us did. Hard to imagine the tonnage of suffering history holds, and hard to fathom why this is given such little attention in philosophy; this, THE most salient feature of our existence. Just perverse, if you ask me, which is why I have qualified high regard for Kant; I don't think he at all understood ethics in its nature. Deontology begs the question of the final ground for prima facie moral obligation in ethics, this question: why bother at all?
Quoting Mww
That object is the sensory intuitions and concept unity. You can't speak of the object that is outside of this unity. The time/space of the object is what "resides in you" and this is ALL a representation. There is no object in the normal way science and everydayness says there is. So when you say "and not in the object to which the principle merely applies" I am sure this is not what Kant's "idealism" is about. The object IS sensory intuition conjoined with a concept in the apriori intuitions of space and time.
Quoting Mww
No, no. First, this "must be" is only because he wants separate phenomena from that which it represents, not from any analytic necessity. But you seem to think Kant is allowing something like "nature" which you referred to earlier, some objective substratum, but this is not how it is. It is entirely a negative concept as he is referring to a transcendental object, which is just
[i]the concept of a noumenon. [u]It is not
indeed in any way positive[/u], and is not a determinate knowledge of anything, but signifies only the thought of something in general, in which I abstract from everything that belongs to
the form of sensible intuition.[/i]
In other words, he is not talking about a thing in any way determined by some even vaguely physical standards. It is entirely determined transcendentally. Read on and see the way he qualifies this "object" (and it is very obvious that his thinking is highly suspect right at the outset, for, after all, what is an 'object' by Kant's own system? It is a concept that is a synthesis, and can ONLY apply, vis a vis a world of things, to empirical objects). He says,
it is still an open question whether the notion of
a noumenon be not a mere form of a
concept, and whether, A 253
when this separation has been made, any object whatsoever
is left."
You see, the whole idea is a fiction.Something has to be there to make for the unity of the sensible object before one, but maybe not. The noumenal is only a concept. Further:
[i]The object to which I relate appearance in general is
the transcendental object, that is, [u]the completely indeterminate
thought of something in general. This cannot be entitled the noumenon
for I know nothing of what it is in
itself, and have no concept of it save as merely the object of
a sensible intuition in general, and so as being one and the
same for all appearances..I cannot think it through any category ;
for a category is valid [only] for empirical intuition, as
bringing it under a concept of object in general. A pure use of
the category is indeed possible [logically], that is, without contradiction;
but it has no objective validity, since the category
is not then being applied to any intuition so as to impart to it
the unity of an object. For the category is a mere function
of thought, through which no object is given to me, and by
which I merely think that which may be given in intuition.[/i]
Cannot think it through any category?? But what is the term 'object'? It is a categorically structured concept. You see how deep in the woods he is. Where do you find thinking like this, thinking that annihilates concepts? You find it in the Dialectic under Transcendental Illusion. The question is, why is the concept of noumena allowed to survive at all? Why is it not dismissed in a paralogism?
Quoting Mww
A flaw? I think it depends. He doesn't seem to realize that the transcendental use of the categories is impossible even as he says they are impossible. He wants to say it is possible and the door is open, but you can tell in the way he goes on page after page in Noumena and Phenomena that he only grudgingly talks about it. I mean, take a good look at these disclaimers, one after the other; the only thing he does not admit is that since logic cannot be an analytic means of access into its own nature, therefore all this talk about noumena is just nonsense. The analytic of noumena IS, after all, a construction of thought, and his whole point is that there are RULES to thoughtful meaning making, and very rigorous ones.
That is the flaw. He must affirm more than he is willing to do, for the Dialectic goes through great pains to nullify groundless metaphysics, and this should render noumena nonsense, which is he says it is, only in terms that leave a door open that should be closed. BUT: in my thinking, this by no means closes the door on transcendental thinking; it only redefines it, even redeems it. This notion of thing in itself is not nonsense at all, but must be determined, for its meaning, in a deeper analytic of what is given in "appearance" for noumena in is, in his language, discovered in "representations," obviously, since there are no "discoveries" of noumena; it just a general concept entirely negative in nature--what is noumenal is not of sensible intuitions, nor is it analytically determined. It is JUST an empty concept.
He doesn't see, in other words, that what is noumenal is truly discovered in phenomena, and there is only one conclusion to this: they are same. The phenomenon is noumenal and the noumenon is phenomenal. The tree IS over there and it IS both accessible and not accessible, that is, transcendental. This term 'transcendental' refers to the openness of the conceptual delimitations of the world's concepts, that is, ALL concepts are open. We call it a tree, but this calling, this taking that over there "as" the particle of language 'tree' does not exhaust the meaning possiblities of what stands before me. Kant's noumenal talk puts the transcendence of the tree-out-of-meaning, again, due to Kant's insistence about the limits of meaning making, which is the real "flaw" of his thinking (what you get when a radical rationalist takes up philosophy).
People like Kant are intuitively limited. Logically brilliant, capable of extraordinary control of thought, but they just don't get things they cannot "get".
If the object IS the intuition, what use would pure a priori intuitions themselves, have?
The object is not the sensory intuition, but only the occassion by which it is possible.
Conjoined concepts in the a priori intuitions of space and time, is form. The synthesis of this form, with the matter given a posteriori as sensation, gives phenomena, that which represents objects perceived by the senses.
The phenomenon IS sensory intuition.
Quoting Astrophel
Agreed, but still, there IS an object .
Quoting Astrophel
.and insofar as the normal way of science and everydayness demands it should be so, I think thats the epitome of Kantian idealism, re: the supremacy of the subject, in that he gives to bestows upon .objects that which is commonly thought as belonging to them.
Quoting Astrophel
Agreed, the object cannot be spoken of outside the construct of its representation, but the object is not that construct. One minor exception might be that the object can be spoken of as existing, for that is the singular necessary condition for all that follows. Re: Platos knowledge that, or Russells knowledge by acquaintance.
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Quoting Astrophel
How can it not be analytically necessary, when that object which is outside of me most certainly is not in the same space as the object which is my body? The must of the quote, and the must be of my comment relates only me and objects that affect my senses, as yet having nothing to do with phenomena.
Furthermore, it isnt so much that he wants to separate phenomena from that which it represents, but rather, it is a mandate of his transcendental doctrine that human knowledge is of representations of things and not of things as they are in themselves.
Quoting Astrophel
Yeah, I do think Kants metaphysical program, in all its various iterations, requires something like Nature, in order to have that which stands on one end of his intrinsic dualism: everything from objective moral behavior, to irreducible proofs for logical syllogisms, to rebutting Newton.
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I agree with a lot of your interpretations here, but not so much with your conclusions. That being said
Quoting Astrophel
Signifies thought of something. In general. Where there is thought alone, the inputs from the faculties of sensibility are vacant, representations being borrowed from consciousness for those antecedent experiences, from understanding itself for those merely possible experiences. All this time weve been talking of objects in general, for which the immediate input from sensibility is absolutely required.
Why the switch? Whats this have to do with Nature?
Quoting Astrophel
Agreed.
Quoting Astrophel
Noumena is entirely determined transcendentally? Noumena are not determined at all; ever notice there is never any noumenal thing? There is never any synthesis of representation into a cognition, which can then be represented by a definitive conception, which, empirically with respect to possible things, is entirely the purview of understanding.
Noumena, the concept, arises spontaneously from understanding, as do all concepts, in this case, simply because understanding is that by which .I can think whatever I please, provided only that I do not contradict myself . Noumena, then, is exactly that contradictory thought, the concept without the requisite synthesis of representations, hence, without the possibility of cognizing an object subsumed under the concept.
. But there is one advantage in such transcendental inquiries which can be made comprehensible to the dullest and most reluctant learnerthis, namely, that the understanding which is occupied merely with empirical exercise, and does not reflect on the sources of its own cognition, may exercise its functions very well and very successfully, but is quite unable to do one thing, and that of very great importance, to determine, namely, the bounds that limit its employment, and to know what lies within or without its own sphere.
The only transcendental going on here, is reasons examination of the understandings stepping out of bounds in its attempts to cognize the impossible.
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Quoting Astrophel
It is HIS thinking that shows common understandings thinking, is suspect. Suspect insofar as it isnt paying attention to its own rules. Those rules being for cognition, synthesis of phenomena and the pure conceptions.
Quoting Astrophel
Agreed. So I guess I dont understand the point youre making. If you already knew that noumena are only concepts, and given understandings propensity to run away with itself, and reasons obligation to correct the rampage .what more is there?
Quoting Astrophel
Because he said understanding doesnt recognize its own limitations. Thought is spontaneous, concepts arise unbidden, which we know for a fact is the case. We can think whatever we want. Usually, we just move on to the next thought, but if we stop and examine what we just did, we find there is nothing the thought contains that does anything positive for us. Which, is course, is why noumena are treated negatively, to show what we cant do in relation to empirical knowledge as such.
The point here is that noumena is not merely an empty concept. Kant was wrong. The next stop is Kierkegaard, Hegel, Heidegger's What Is Metaphysics? There are no divisions between the given world and that which it represents. The world we see and acknowledge every day is not analytically reducible to representation. It IS the world and this represents nothing, but is a stand alone manifestation of what is "there". Any "transcendence" that arises issues from immanence.
This is where Husserl's epoche takes one, to the transcendence of the given. My issues with Kant are post Kantian. See, e.g., Max Scheler's Formalism and Nonformalism in Value (something like that) or Hildebrandt's Ethics. See the critical post Kantian literature. Soon I'll start on Fichte, though only because Michel Henry is forcing me to, because reading his Essence of Manifestation insists. Kant only can be understood in light of the substantial response to Kant.
Nice talking to you! :ok:
It pains me greatly to admit I no longer have the acuity, and perhaps not even the time, to absorb first order critical philosophy. Its like .all I absorbed before is all Im gonna get. And considering how long THAT took .(sigh).
That being said, it was indeed a pleasure talking to you. Have fun with M. Henry.