On 'pastness' (for Bloodninja): If you look at endnote 29 in the Farin translation of The Concept of Time, I think it becomes clear that 'pastness' involves a seeing of ourselves as already dead. We imagine ourselves in terms of the stain we have left behind. We are yanked out of the they by a horror of having left no mark, of having died a nobody who just went with the flow. We became nothing, left the most radical possibilities of ourselves as creative interpretation unused, wasted. We never really lived in the sense that we never really lived our death. Or we lived our death as demise, dying as 'one' dies, like the 'humans' in Brave New World.

To be clear, science is great. We have no choice. Doubts of the uniformity of nature are theoretical. They are 'silly.' But they are fascinating. To me the problem of induction is beautiful like a chess problem. How strange it is. What initially delighted me about it was that it was sologically revealed. Thinking opens a strangeness that was invisible. If this isn't practical, who said thinking should always be practical? For me the practical is valuable to some degree because it opens up the free time to enjoy reality aesthetically.

This is close to the heart of the matter. The question is about the reality of concepts. According to (old school) realism, it is the mind's ability to understand universals that is the basis for rational judgement; that is what is meant by 'intelligibility'; and universals are real, not simply 'in the mind'. That is what leads to all of the conundrums about 'where they are', and the sense in which they can be said to exist. Nowadays we say that what exists is 'out there somewhere'; which illustrates how we can only conceive of things that exist within space-time. Whereas, universals precede space-time. — Wayfarer

It does seem that we have ripped apart meaning and 'reality' for practical reasons. Dazzled by utility, we forget that this ripping-apart always already exists within a field of meaning or understanding of being. We take a useful fiction as an absolute. This useful fiction, a mere tool, is made sacred. It becomes a hardened notion of the rational itself (the 'technical interpretation of thinking.') We learn a basic notion of the world as resources to be used/conserved, dead-stuff about which we can be correct. The value-layer is something else, important perhaps but not 'theologically' real like the stuff we can be correct about. If I critique this worldview in terms of its incorrectness, however, then I slip into the essence of the paradigm. I criticize the technical interpretation thinking within the technical interpretation of thinking. For me this is like religion that learns to understand itself as an opposing scientific framework, metaphysical as opposed to physical.

I do think we can grasp universals as atoms to some degree, but the phenomenon of deference (which I learned about (or to see) in Bennington's Derrida) suggests that we usually have a 'field' of dynamic meaning. The flow of this payload semantic consider. Not atomically really operate in their employment the signs. Crystallization is both aesthetically and pragmatically justified, but there's something alluring in the in-the-faceness of the object of phenomenology.

On the other hand, we don't see how to build a gadget from it, so it's suspect. There is no such thing as experience, right? We fit what exists to the method, not the method to what exists. Philosophy asks questions that make the scientists giggle. 'Why is there someting rather than nothing' must refer to the absence of objects in the space of physics, not to the presence of the field of meaning or the there itself in which something a concept of space can exist. An anti-wonder is at work. Wonder is suspect. I even understand that. It is manly to be astonished at nothing. It's just girlish hysteria to find something surprising, uncanny. I strive for a neutrality that demonizes neither wonder nor anti-wonder. I want to see what's going on, maybe even as simply as possible but no simpler.

The view I favour is that universals are actually inherent in the structure of reality - they're not simply concepts, because they're predictive of features of reality that otherwise we couldn't know. — Wayfarer

I'd go so far to suggest that 'universals' (functioning together as the field of meaning) are the structure of reality. Reality as we experience it is deeply linguistic, conceptual, meaningful. The subject-object paradigm breaks down to some degree when we understood the revelatory/creative power of language that we are perhaps too quick to think of as sounds that buzz over an otherwise meaningless space filled with unnamed objects. This space of unnamed objects is itself revealed/created by the language it demotes. It's useful sometimes to think in terms of a values as a film that sticks to what is really there. We learn a certain practically potent way of thinking the world and forget that this thinking of the world is not the world itself. (But this 'world itself' is not to be immediately understood in terms of the in-itself of physics. 'Logical space' seems to involve a basic intuition of being-with-others in a shared world of language. If we say that the physics world is an illusion, we aren't thinking of holding it against the world of physics to see its failure to correspond. We are holding it against a presumably shared world of experience. We mean that it is false in the sense that it conceals possible experience.)

Is this relativity itself relative? Or understood as an absolute? And was it not established on an assumption of the uniformity of nature? How could any theory be confirmed or survive attempts to falsify it apart from the assumption of the uniformity of nature? If you know of a potent retort to Hume's problem, I'll check it out.

I don't understand what you're saying here. Perhaps you could explain. As far as I understand, a sign is created, and therefore there must be a subject prior to the existence of the sign, such that it is impossible for the subject to be a sign. — Metaphysician Undercover

Admittedly this is deep water. The Mobius strip is no joke. We are in a world that is in us that is in the world, etc.

Do you remember a time 'before language,' before being immersed in signs? Do you remember being a pure subject without access to the sign? Or was your ability to understand yourself made possible 'within' or 'with' language? But what is this language? Is it really conceivable apart from our movements in the 'primordial' world of 'being-with-others.' I don't mean the systematic nature that we learn as an abstraction. I mean learning to turn doorhandles, flush toilets, not bump into furniture, stand at the right distance from others, 'comport' ourselves appropriately.

Our pre-theoretical immersion in the world includes (some have argued) a non-theoretical sense of being-with-others. We see objects not as meaningless shapes but in terms of what they are good for and what they mean not only for us but also for others. The metaphysical-scientific tendency is to 'deworld' or rip away all of this in the pursuit of an eternal skeleton. It does the same thing with language, too, ripping concepts out of the deferment and entangledness of meaning in order to just stare at an 'atom' of meaning. It needs crisp context-independent meaning to build an timeless image of the timeless skeleton.

I understand that 'consciousness' is apparently tied a particular brain that can be located in space and time. On the other hand, 'consciousness' is 'being itself' somehow. That we survive to see the death of others suggests that there is some substratum apart from our own brain that nevertheless opens up the 'there' in which all of these concepts exist. So I believe in something like the metaphysical subject of Wittgenstein, but it does seem to be a notion that evolved historically within language. We create pointers to the 'there' that themselves only exist within the there. "Being is not a being." Any specification of the 'subject' is already saying too much. The 'subject' is is itself? But this is said within a shared field of meaning that apparently has its foundation in a substratum. Deep water. I don't pretend to have it all figured out. Just sharing a bit of my own (largely borrowed and inherited) thinking...

*I highly recommend The Concept of Time. It's the first draft of B&T, only 100 pages. By no means am I saying that Heidegger is the last word. I'm just delighted by 1920s Heidegger having previously been in a Hegel phase.

Satisfaction and serenity is never sustained as all context-dependent moments die. The longing for death is nostalgia for the before birth (pace Cioran). — schopenhauer1

Well put. I call this 'world weariness.' I experience it occasionally. Especially in my 20s, I would sometimes be struck by an intense longing for death. But I was still attached to life, too. So I was ripped in half. Reality was nightmarish, obscene. It was 'noise.' But (humoursly) I could be contemplating suicide, more or less theoretically, and then a pretty girl would cross my path. I would be ripped out of my gloom by her pretty face. Then she'd vanish and I'd laugh at the ridiculousness of this zig-zag. I speculate that there's a shift of eros or libido from the death-object to the life-object to the death-object, etc. We don't lust for death when are lust is aimed at objects that exist.

For me the desire for the female and the desire for knowledge have been dominant. We might think of this desire for knowledge as narcissistic --since it involves playing the knowledge-hero, being noble via possession of or proximity to the truth-as-god. The dangerous thing about this chasing of truth-as-god is that it involves the ideological violence that can (for us has) put the value of life itself in question. In some sense the most radical and fearless doubt is that which doubts the value of life and therefore of knowledge itself. In short, there is a 'suicidal' potential lurking in the knowledge-hero understood as demystificaiton incarnate. Demystification makes short work of everything sacred. Otherwise out of targets or prey, its greed for domination is turned back against itself. This opens both suicide as a beautifully decisive action and/or 'the laughter of the gods.' For me Steppenwolf is largely about this revelation, and Hesse, of course, sides with laughing with the gods. His protagonist is opened up by sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll jazz to a less rigidly rational or stuffy sense of life. He has visions of the wicked laughter of his hero Mozart (one of the immortals originally justifying his disgust for middle-class intellectual/emotional complacency.) To be sure, Hesse is biased. He is 'decorating' his own choice, not doing science.

But the there there of pessimism is trying to get at real of the position we find ourselves in. You would like pessimists to realize some "truth" of the skepticism. — schopenhauer1

In some sense yes, but not in the typical sense. I acknowledge something like a 'primordial' desire to influence others. There is a 'fight for recognition' of one's own interpretation. But my own view strives for an awareness of precisely this kind of fight. It doesn't escape or pretend to escape from what it describes. That it explains itself (or seems to) is one of its virtues. This theme is big in Kojeve --the idea that a philosophy should be able to explain its own appearance.

Where you will assert that you "won" by this repartee of ideas "proves" it is truth-tools, I will claim that I "won" when you live the very restless/survival life that pessimism describes. — schopenhauer1

I see that. I understand. I think the sense of winning involves a kind of faith in the unjustified foundation of one's justifications. I postulate a sort of brute self-assertion. But that's another reason that I experience the contingency of perspectives, including (problematically, confessedly) my own.

Where I disagree is that despite these "shadows" of language terms and neologisms, there is a sort of truth behind it that is being conveyed, — schopenhauer1

I don't deny that there is some hard kernel, but I think the boundaries of this kernel are established by interpretation.

So the problem of induction isn't really a problem. If we couldn't doubt, how could we say we believed? — apokrisis

I take your point, but Hume could squeeze out enough theoretical doubt to make the issue conspicuous. I think the OP does the same thing. Maybe it's not something we can take 'seriously' away from the intellectual pleasure involved in this making conspicuous. But that's true of lots of metaphysics. A thoroughly practical mind might grudgingly/generously call it poetry or conceptual art as opposed to nonsense.

I'm not accusing you of this, but it's easy to imagine a 'smug quietism' misreading genuine logical tensions as language on holiday, complacently waiting for the acknowledgement of such tensions to become conventional, respectable. Why is the 'meaning of being' not a pseudo-question while the OP is? Is this completely divorced from the public dominance of this or that thinker? Are any of us immune to the pressure to be intellectually respectable?

My question, specifically, is the unreasonable association of morality and reason. To me the expression ''good reason'' is proof of the morality-reason connection. Yet, when we apply rationality to morality all we get is confusion.

What's the problem here? Could it be that morality is irrational? Goodness is associated with foolishness e.g. a young person is described as naive or innocent (unaware of the Big Bad World). — TheMadFool

To me this confusion is best explained by considering all the unconsidered baggage that we are bringing to the question. If we assume without questioning it that virtue should be 'metaphysically ground' and that 'rationality is X' then we will indeed experience dissonance.

In some sense, I think morality is 'irrational,' in that it is prior to (as the foundation of) what we mean by 'rational.' If we assume that some kind of cold, ideal logic is authorative (good), then the invisibility of 'good' to this cold, ideal logic looks like a problem, like a collision of goods. If we think of langauge use as inherently social, however, we can see that truth-finding is value-laden and just as well described in terms of consensus building. We cope with both physical and social reality using language. If we impose unrealistic distinctions (a radical gap between metaphysics and morality), then strange problems appear. I'm suggesting we look into these distinctions. In short, we experience it as 'good' to be rational in a way that is largely invisible to a narrowly conceived version of rationality.

Reason is key to survival and look at all the scientific truths we've discovered using rationality. — TheMadFool

But why do we like to survive? And justifying our liking reason in terms of the truths it brings us only further makes my point, as I see it. We like reason because it gives us truth. Why do we like truths? They help us survive comfortably. They satisfy curiosity. They can even function as a substitute for God. We can put ourselves in touch with something beyond our pettiness. The truth is cold and pure. It is unchanging like the stars. But the stars do change, so the 'metaphysical' truth (if we can get it) is even more 'godlike' than the stars, even more 'outside of time.'

And we have quantum theory to tell us that radioactive decay is an intrinsically independent process. — apokrisis

What do you make of Hume's problem of induction? I have no real doubt about the uniformity of nature, but it seems to me that quantum theory is founded in our trust in this uniformity. In theory, all the order we have come to trust in could go to hell. Admittedly this would probably wipe out our ability to notice this going-to-hell. We'd die instantly. But isn't it logically possible ? I don't expect to be suddenly wiped out by a change in the 'laws' of nature, but I have yet to see a way around Hume's

'problem.'

So in principle, the "clock of the universe" could speed up or slow down and we couldn't notice it. But it is the fact itself that we couldn't notice a difference that then means there ain't anything to worry about - except people's metaphysical hankering for externalist accounts of reality. — apokrisis

I think you're assuming a 'nice' version of the scenario. If things that 'should' be in sync go out of sync, then we'd be thrown into the crisis of deciding which 'law' had been violated. We would of course to include this violation in a still more general law. We can of course postulate the law of the change of the laws. But I don't see how we aren't always relying on an intuitive faith in the uniformity of nature.

Note that I can only 'doubt' this faith theoretically, so there's no question of disregarding science here. It is almost sanity itself to project uniformity on nature.

I don't see how you get "I am mostly us" out of this. Yes, it's true that we are influenced by language and other human beings, but we are also influenced by everything else around us, and each person is a unique individual. — Metaphysician Undercover

From my perspective, your're underestimating the 'power' of language here. You seem to take the subject as an absolute without understanding the subject as a sign or concept that only gets its content or meaning via its relations to other concepts. Concepts exist systematically. 'I' learn how to use the word 'I,' just as I learn to use the word 'fair' or 'good,' but I'm not so sure that there are crystalline entities that correspond the intelligibly distinct symbols. This perception of the symbols as distinct wholes is what I have in mind in the intuition of unity. If we ignore the deferment of (happening right now) meaning and just 'stare' at a sign or object, we can pluck it out from its background (circle it). Math with integers is 'certain' precisely because we work with the 'pure form' of unity. In my view, the pure subject is related to this intuition of unity. 'I' learn to understand myself as distinct, a 'crystalline' metaphysical object distinct from the not-I, itself 'enclosed' in a 'circle' and ripped out of the flow of meaning-making, meaning-being.

Therefore you must say "I am part of us". And by doing this you give logical priority to the individual "I". This logical priority is established because reason proceeds from the more certain toward the lesser certain. — Metaphysician Undercover

For me this experience of the subject as more certain than the 'us' is an inherited pre-interpretation of the situation. We start from something like the Cartesian subject without questioning it. We don't look at the 'things themselves.' It's even hard if not impossible to look at our experience 'around' what's 'encrusted' in the language we begin with. 'Phenomenology' is a good name for the thrust against our 'finitude' (our typically binding inherited mostly- invisible interpretative frameworks.)

Taking two faulty rulers to countercheck each other doesn't solve the problem of whether we have the right measurement. — TheMadFool

Right. I think you've opened a nice philosophical can of worms, kind of like Hume's problem of induction. It may not be a practical question, but I do not think it's only a matter of playing with words. I disagree that it's a pseudo-question.

Since 1967, the International System of Units (SI) has defined the second as the duration of 9192631770 cycles of radiation corresponding to the transition between two energy levels of the caesium-133 atom. In 1997, the International Committee for Weights and Measures (CIPM) added that the preceding definition refers to a caesium atom at rest at a temperature of 0 K.[15] — wiki

How would we know 'officially' if the transitions were slowing down or speeding up? They are themselves the 'official' measure. Practically we would see things out sync (other periodic processes would be out of sync with the cesium.) We'd be thrown into a scientific crisis/opportunity.

The paradox in a nutshell: We must always have a good reason for anything but there's no good reason to be good. — TheMadFool

How about this: we feel that it is good to be able to give reasons. We 'unreasonably' like reasons. We have an image of virtue that compels us, and this image is of a human that is reasonable. [On second thought, I think it's less explicit than that. From childhood we are taught to give an account of ourself. This just becomes more theoretical-metaphysical perhaps as we try to give persuasive accounts in terms of abstract authorities (?)]

A different approach: do we seek for reasons to eat food when we are hungry? Or only justifications when others don't want us to eat the food? Do we need a reason to look at a picture of someone we find attractive? Or just an excuse if this looking is challenged by others or the conflict of this looking with another desire (to transcend lust, not be shallow, etc.) Isn't desire primary? The 'good' is perhaps a name for the object of a certain kind of desire, for what we desire to see in ourselves and others.

This seems problematic (for me) because how do we know the vibrations of the atom used to define a second is regular? To me the only way we can decide this is by using another process or phenomenon we know to be regular but then how do we know that particular process or phenomenon is regular? And so on... — TheMadFool

That's a great point. It looks like we have to trust in some kind of uniformity. But there's also Hume's problem of induction. So the trust in uniformity is also there in the laws themselves that involve time. Science looks to be founded on some basic sense of the order in the world, a sense that it also encourages.

I don't read Hegel as asserting that being is a "pure thing"; rather it is no-thing. This is Hegel's preemption of Heidegger's ontological difference. I also believe Hegel is concerned with the "what-it-is" of being, but rather with unravelling the logic of the concept of being. That-it-is is a given; Hegel would echo Spinoza in declaring that there is no possibility that there could be nothing. Being is no-thing, ( insofar as we cannot say anything really determinate about it) but it obviously is not nothing at all.

I would say that being is certainly not an abstraction for Hegel. In a way Hegel's notion of being equates with his idea of spirit. the world of beings is the dialectical manifestation of spirit. — Janus

Again, I can't claim to know what Hegel had in mind, but only share what I make of his text. I underline what inspired me to understand being as bare or pure unity.

Being, pure being, without any further determination. In its indeterminate immediacy it is equal only to itself. It is also not unequal relatively to an other; it has no diversity within itself nor any with a reference outwards. It would not be held fast in its purity if it contained any determination or content which could be distinguished in it or by which it could be distinguished from an other. It is pure indeterminateness and emptiness. There is nothing to be intuited in it, if one can speak here of intuiting; or, it is only this pure intuiting itself. Just as little is anything to be thought in it, or it is equally only this empty thinking. Being, the indeterminate immediate, is in fact nothing, and neither more nor less than nothing.

Nothing, pure nothing: it is simply equality with itself, complete emptiness, absence of all determination and content — undifferentiatedness in itself. In so far as intuiting or thinking can be mentioned here, it counts as a distinction whether something or nothing is intuited or thought. To intuit or think nothing has, therefore, a meaning; both are distinguished and thus nothing is (exists) in our intuiting or thinking; or rather it is empty intuition and thought itself, and the same empty intuition or thought as pure being. Nothing is, therefore, the same determination, or rather absence of determination, and thus altogether the same as, pure being
— Hegel

I realize that Heidegger was probably inspired by this connection of being and nothing, but I don't see the ontological difference here at all. It looks like concept analysis.

I don't agree that the subject is the world for Wittgenstein. — Janus

I respect your disagreement. I don't pretend to be sure of what he meant, and I also don't want to be mistaken as trying to argue from an authority I don't believe in. I quote some of the lines relevant to what I am imperfectly aiming at.

Here it can be seen that solipsism, when its implications are followed
out strictly, coincides with pure realism. The self of solipsism shrinks to
a point without extension, and there remains the reality co-ordinated with
it.

Thus there really is a sense in which philosophy can talk about the
self in a non-psychological way. What brings the self into philosophy is
the fact that 'the world is my world'. The philosophical self is not the
human being, not the human body, or the human soul, with which psychology
deals, but rather the metaphysical subject, the limit of the world--not a
part of it.
— W

Note that you left out a key part when you quote the line above. "Not a part of it." So what is this self that the world is for?

So too at death the world does not alter, but comes to an end. — W

I agree with you that the world is 'my' world in an important sense. As I read Heidegger it is death that most clearly reveals to the 'Dasein' that it is the there itself. But this is the there of being-in, of being-with-others.

It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it
exists.

To view the world sub specie aeterni is to view it as a whole--a
limited whole. Feeling the world as a limited whole--it is this that is
mystical. — W

This 'that it exists' is central for me. I can't be sure what 'feeling it as a limited whole' meant to Witgenstein, but I speculate that we have to grasp all that exists as a unity to open up the strangeness of its being there. It's one thing to wonder at a particular thing and another to wonder at the there itself.

When the answer cannot be put into words, neither can the question be
put into words. The riddle does not exist. If a question can be framed at
all, it is also possible to answer it.

Scepticism is not irrefutable, but obviously nonsensical, when it
tries to raise doubts where no questions can be asked. For doubt can exist
only where a question exists, a question only where an answer exists, and
an answer only where something can be said. — W

I read this in terms of the brute fact of the world, of the senselessness of the question 'why is there anything rather than nothing?' It's a lyrical pseudo-question with respect to the way we usually understand explanation in terms of necessary relationships between entities within the world. Yet this pseudo-question opens up 'the mystical.'

There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make
themselves manifest. They are what is mystical. — W

This is less clear to me. I find it plausible to read this in terms of either feeling or the that-it-is-there.

I think he refers here to the world as experienced. He was no solipsist.

In any case I disagree that we experience the world or that we experience ourselves as being my world. We undergo affects, which we experience as events, people, places, things and so on; along with emotions, thoughts and desires that are occasioned by our experience of these. We think of this as my life, in which we are engaged with these things, the totality of which we think of as my world. But the shared inter-subjective world is always already externalized insofar as it is objectivized as a world of events and objects that are publicly available to experience. — Janus

We probably roughly agree. I acknowledge that being-with-others and being-in-the-world (Heidegger) is pretty close to the pre-theoretical given. But what throws me off is 'objectivized,' because that makes it sound more explicit and theoretical than the 'given' I have in mind. Wittgenstein is a little scientistic in the TLP. He doesn't examine spatiality and time as they are experienced but adopts physics space and physics time unquestioningly. I think Heidegger does a good job of showing just how 'deworlded' the physics versions of time and space are. They are learned abstractions.

I very much agree with concerned engagement as primary, though. But do we not largely disappear into this engagement? The subject is largely an abstraction that is there, itself a usetool, 'for' the metaphysical subject, which is to say 'in the there' which it therefore cannot be.

All is fictions upon fictions. Truths are just tools. — schopenhauer1

I do cherish the tool metaphor as a corrective of mind-jamming representationalism. But I think truth as correspondence is great most of the time. I do think, however, that this correspondence paradigm breaks down as we move away from practical life and toward interpretations of existence as a whole.

The rationalizating (for me) is our understanding of the situation. — t0m

Right, there is nothing to behold outside of conceptualizations- pragmatist/post-modern stance — schopenhauer1

I added underlining because I think you missed rationalization as understanding. Of course I believe in the world outside of language. I even believe that understanding is not necessarily conceptual. But I was just trying to stress that our understanding of the world is its conceptual structure 'for us' almost tautologically. To call it a 'rationalization' is of course to add bias to this understanding, but I thought we agreed on that?

Language games come out of it, not the other way around. Your liquid turns back to ice :p. — schopenhauer1

But we've talked about that, in terms of 'post facto.' We are thrown into life. If a titty or a bottle isn't shoved into our mouth, we die. If we don't eat, the brain dies. A pretty face annihilates the pride in one's high talk. We are ripped down from ironic-pessimistic into the primordial game of wanting a smile from that face. In some ways, my view is the opposite of faith in language games. The 'tool' metaphor is an acknowledgement of the primacy of desire. We only represent to accomplish something, possess something, enjoy ourselves as something. This desire glues us to the senses, the world outside language --with the important exception of wanting to be a strong poet. For Bukowski, writing was a way to kick death's ass. I'd say he was really living his death.

I'm not hip to all of Heidegger's (plethora of) neologisms. Please enlighten me of the "they" versus whatever other dichotomy he thought up. — schopenhauer1

The idea is that we are mostly no one in particular when we move in the daily world. We do what one does, say what one says, drive how one drives. The very language we use is crammed with a pre-interpretation of existence, of the things we encounter. 'This is for that.' This 'they' or 'anyone' is a personification of the generic personality of a culture, a personality we have to 'incarnate' to become functioning, sane adults who are capable of understanding one another. I can't be me until I've become the we and started to question the very 'operating system' that makes this questioning possible.

My current understanding is that our 'finitude' is the impossibility of every getting completely behind or around this inherited 'software.' We might say the desire to get around this finitude is the desire to be one's own father, to have one's foundation in oneself. (Joyce, Sartre, Bloom). I'm sure I'm laying the Heidegger down pretty thick, but I'm pretty dazzled by the fresh territory. It'll become taken-for-granted at some point. 'Whatever we can find words for is already dead in our heart.'

But the point I am trying to make is the mere description is revealing some forces going on internally behind the scenes- even if it simply capturing it in mere description. There is a reference there. There is a there there. Not all is liquid that melts. Thus the structure holds. — schopenhauer1

I don't exactly deny the there there. I would have to appeal to this there in order to deny it. There is something like 'logical space' or 'being-with-others' that is prior to the objective world of science. I say this because I can imagine someone denying that the world of scientific theory is not the true world. The 'true' world is 'primordial' or something understood vaguely as the 'shared world' or the mysterious 'that' to which non-scientific propositions must conform to be correct.

I suppose I do have doubts about the logical space of interpretations of existence. I experience this space in some way to the degree that I believe what I believe. But thinking about this space puts it into question. To be clear, the ordinary version of this space is as intact as ever. I think the houses outside my window are really there. I can't move them or make them vanish with words. But my belief in God vanished once, washed away indeed by mere words.

I know by actively debating this you are trying to prove your point- it is just a contest of language games trying to subsume the other language. We will both walk away thinking that our language games have indeed won out. We will both say that despite your rhetoric, my argument was self-evident in what was said. Mine because your lived-life will thus prove it, yours because this little repartee of back and forth proves that it's all just truth-tools. — schopenhauer1

That is a great example as you say of what I theorize about, this way that we enclose and neutralize one another's assaults on dearly held beliefs. That's part of the thrill, testing ourselves in a friendly kind of war. I have played bullet-chess obsessively in my day. But 'just trying to prove my point' is somewhat reductive. I really love writing. Conversations with others inspire me. I find new metaphors. I overhear myself. This 'overhearing' is very important, I think. We automatically see ourselves through the eyes of our conversational partner, sometimes discovering certain excesses or failures of style through this empathetic leap. Of course I also learn from others, assimilate what they offer. Finally this conversation is life experience. I'm a theorist of the dialectical clash dialectically clashing with others in the presentation of this dialectical clash. It's strange, exciting, absorbing.

But you have to eat. Word games or not. Calculations cause things to happen. Calculations are based on axioms that can lead to elaborate maths. Things can be communicated clearly and with little metaphor. Of course, we are talking existential truths, which indeed does allow for a large dose of such things as metaphor, intuition, feeling, and a kind of aesthetic intuition. However, as long as the languages can be translatable to common language in a certain way, there are ways to make some sense of people's preferred metaphors. — schopenhauer1

Math is my job, even my twin passion, so I know what you mean. There is an ecstasy is programming Turing machines to multiply natural numbers. It's so clear, so perfectly unambiguous. It is cold steel, but harder than steel. It is the true metaphysics, one might say, at least near the integers and the theory of computation. It's thinking of the continuum in terms of sets, however, caused an ontological crisis. Do we abandon intuition for pure logic, even if this means we can no longer see what we mean in our minds? Do we trade meaning for an extension of what we can still be unmeaningly rigorous about?

I underlined the part where you pretty much agree with me. Maybe there's a quantitative difference, but we both see that existential truths are quite different from math. For me math is the 'pure form' that is also in language. Language has a logical core. Entities are still 'units' or unities. But metaphor is foggy. It is liquid as opposed to crystalline. The metaphysical dream needs a language as rigid as math, a language that doesn't rust and mutate, subject to time. It was Eliot of Pound who stressed that poets have to keep making it new, precisely because poems lose their force away from the living, linguistic context of their day.

As Hegel pointed out pure being or substance must be thought to be akin to nothingness (no-thing-ness) or your (and Anaximander's) Apeiron. — Janus

Maybe Hegel missed something, though, when he focused on the what-it-is as opposed to the that-it-is of being. His being is just a pure thing, an entity about which nothing can be said. He images this being 'already there.' So his being is not the being of beings in a stronger sense but only an abstraction of what they all have in common, which is bare or indeterminate unity.

Being, pure being, without any further determination. In its indeterminate immediacy it is equal only to itself. It is also not unequal relatively to an other; it has no diversity within itself nor any with a reference outwards. It would not be held fast in its purity if it contained any determination or content which could be distinguished in it or by which it could be distinguished from an other. It is pure indeterminateness and emptiness. There is nothing to be intuited in it, if one can speak here of intuiting; or, it is only this pure intuiting itself. Just as little is anything to be thought in it, or it is equally only this empty thinking. Being, the indeterminate immediate, is in fact nothing, and neither more nor less than nothing. — Hegel

The 'thereness' of entities can only be 'nothing' in a dry conceptual sense, simply because the that-it-is of an entitiy is not its what-it-is But this that-it-is of entities in the field of the there is the condition of possibility for asking after the what-it-is of entities.

Through us the world is for us, (where 'world' is taken to denote 'the collection of things and their relations); the world is always already externalized, it is never my living experience, but merely a conceptualization. — Janus

I don't object to "through us the world is for us." But I don't agree that the world always already externalized. We can think of TLP Wittgenstein's 'metaphysical subject.' It is not 'in the world.' It is the world. Anything that you know about you is 'for you,' an object for this subject that therefore vanishes to a point. And yet this point is the 'there' itself, a synonym for the being of beings. The subject inasmuch as it is an entity for itself is no longer the subject. It is 'world' or 'object.' But the subject-object distinction breaks down if all that is left of the subject is the 'there' of all the things within the there that are not the there.

*I don't at all deny the everyday sense of being a body or of carefully steering this body through the world. Somehow the being of the world is tied to a brain within the world. Yet the world remains after others die. A Mobius strip comes to mind.

here’s a very deep problem with the way the understanding of Descartes’ ‘res cogitans’ developed. It literally means ‘thinking substance’ and that is the way it has become understood. I guess ectoplasm is pretty near the mark. But it’s all a colossal mistake, a category error, a misreading. The philosophical term ‘substantia’ is not ‘substance’ as we understand it, but ‘that in which attributes inhere’. It was the Latin translation of the term ‘ouisia’, which is nearer to ‘being’ than ‘stuff’ — Wayfarer

Along these lines, I'd stress that "thinking substance" tempts us to think of a being among beings, when far more significantly we have the openness of being itself. Through us the world is. We aren't a thing but 'the there' itself, the field in which there are things.

Ideas like "thinking substance" are themselves entities in this 'there' that they aim at. "Thinking substance" does recognize the "productive-creative logic" of or in the there. Ordinary practical life understands this 'there' as a person in a body among bodies. Descartes' forgets to doubt the sense of being trapped in an individual 'mind' that may or may not be right about the non-mind. He's insufficiently 'behind' the inherited pre-interpretation to get the job done, one might say.

In short, the 'subject' tends to be conceived as a view on the object and neglected as the condition of possibility of the object. But this subject-object distinction itself depends on an opening that it tends to obscure in a greed for correctness. Wanting-to-prove-something is an 'attunement' that may constrain what becomes conspicuous. Aren't the so-called subject and the so-called object given radically together? For the most part I "am" what I look at and do. There's a voice in one's head, too, of course. But isn't it interesting that existence or the presence of the there is overlooked in a focus on this 'voice' and its accuracy?

So would I.

So conceding the epistemic argument that perception is not direct, does not mean we can’t turn around and have directness as our epistemic ambition. Not all subjectivism has to be equal. — apokrisis

I agree that we want something like accuracy. Also that not all subjectivism is equal. A radical like Rorty can replace representation with coping, but then we debate not accuracy but effectiveness. The constant is a pushing-forward of ideas as preferable, to-be-believed, to-be-acted-upon. How we justify this preference is perhaps a function of the operant paradigm.

But you are stressing the subjective tree - the one that appears to us even in our dreams. It is tree-ness in all the ways we could possibly imagine. — apokrisis

I can why you would say that, but for me this is still a layer of abstraction on the (non-Kantian) phenomenon. "That which shows itself" is primary, one might say. It shows itself, not its showing. To be fair, taking a phenomenological position is still 'metaphysical' in a certain sense. I can't be right about this IMV but only advertise a preference. (And of course we have different kinds of talk for different purposes. But I see the charm or appeal of direct realism understood in a particular fashion.)

And the concern here is with the objective tree, the mind-independent tree, the Kantian tree-in-itself. — apokrisis

Perhaps, but isn't that already a rush to the answer of the OP's question? Of course I believe in something like a mind-independent tree "out there," but this framework has its tensions. The usual is that the territory apart from the map is seemingly contentless except as the pure negation of the map.

This is where those peddling Wittgensteinian quietism are being disingenuous. — apokrisis

I relate. I think 'quietism' can become a smug hatred of thought.

The language game tree is the social tree, the one that appears to a community of minds connected by a web of linguistic relations. There is a right way of speaking about trees because there is a social level of subjectivity or semiosis. — apokrisis

I agree. I think it's experienced in a non-explicit way. The "shared-world" is a basic intuition or phenomenon. But this tends to get conflated with the scientific image of the world, which of course neglects the role of language and concerned practical involvement in sustaining the condition of possibility for the theoretical-scientific vision of what's 'really' there hidden in all the 'subjective,' value-drenched 'illusion.'-- as if this 'subjective' value wasn't primarily social and didn't maintain a privileging of the scientific image in the first place.

But then the Witti-ites smuggle in their realist claims under the language game smokescreen. Scratch them and you find they believe that makes perception direct. The language game tree is the objective tree - being now defined in terms of the limit of the speakable. — apokrisis

I still read it in terms of an aesthetic preference. Does anyone deny mediation? Or is it all about where to 'stuff' this mediation?

I have quoted this before, but I put it here for reference since it gets at the behind-word-ness mentioned above.

This faith does not formulate itself—it simply lives, and so guards itself against formulae... It is only on the theory that no word is to be taken literally that this anti-realist is able to speak at all. Set down among Hindus he would have made use of the concepts of Sankhya,[7] and among Chinese he would have employed those of Lao-tse[8]—and in neither case would it have made any difference to him.—With a little freedom in the use of words, one might actually call Jesus a “free spirit”[9]—he cares nothing for what is established: the word killeth,[10] whatever is established killeth. The idea of “life” as an experience, as he alone conceives it, stands opposed to his mind to every sort of word, formula, law, belief and dogma. He speaks only of inner things: “life” or “truth” or “light” is his word for the innermost—in his sight everything else, the whole of reality, all nature, even language, has significance only as sign, as allegory. — N

So I'm not really convinced of this ironism. — schopenhauer1

Neither I am, or I wouldn't be convinced of it. It's 'paradoxical' or 'mystical' perhaps. It's 'behind words.' For me the 'mystical' can't be about hidden entities, apart from the hidden 'entity' of feeling. In the high moments this 'irony' becomes poetry, rock-n-roll lyrics. A Hendrix guitar solo is more properly its theology. Myth and music express 'the highest,' for me, though I like trying to mechanically conceptualize this transcendence of the 'mechanical-conceptual.' That's why I stress the 'irrationalilty' of the hero-myth. Our 'final vocabulary' ultimately just happened to seduce us. If 'rationality' is central to this image, then we have an especially volatile dialectic, since we experience facing criticism as a duty.

Procreation is the definition of a decision that affects another. — schopenhauer1

It is bedrock. I agree. Hence the deep 'guilt' of life is concentrated in sex. Lust opens the possibility of horror.

Irony does not erase suffering. I see irony as more a literary tool. It has little impetus outside provoking a humorous response from a reader in a literary/artistic setting. It is a rather impotent in its employ in real life — schopenhauer1

I agree that 'irony' is most naturally understood this way. I take the term itself from Rorty, without completely intending the same thing.

Ironist (n. Ironism) (from Greek: eiron, eironeia), a term coined by Richard Rorty, describes someone who fulfills three conditions:

She has radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she currently uses, because she has been impressed by other vocabularies, vocabularies taken as final by people or books she has encountered;

She realizes that argument phrased in her present vocabulary can neither underwrite nor dissolve these doubts;

Insofar as she philosophizes about her situation, she does not think that her vocabulary is closer to reality than others, that it is in touch with a power not herself.
— Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, p.73
— Wiki

Stirner didn't use the term, but he presented the longest treatment of it that I'm aware of. He's the most focused theorist of the image of virtue (for him 'the sacred') that I've seen. I think this view has skeptical and Christian roots. Feuerbach understood religion as an alienating projection of the species-essence. For Stirner this species-essence was every bit as abstract and alienating. He "intro-jected" not only back the 'creative nothing' (basically the individual) from which images of the sacred emerge. Blake saw the imagination ('poetic genuis') in these terms and spoke of the 'human form divine.' It's Christian heresy, one might say, that takes incarnation to the limit, leaving nothing 'outside' of the godman that demands his reverence --excepting the virtue that he participates in. Stirner was ungenerous to Feuerbach by downplaying just how universal most of virtue is. The 'divine predicates' are more shared than individual. But exaggeration has its value as a way to focus attention, and the rigid humanism of liberals manifests the accusing-alienating potential of a still-pious atheism.

The best rationalization, but the one closest to understanding our situation. Everything is interpretation, but I think there are ones that hit more closer to the truth. — schopenhauer1

Respectfully, I think there's a tension here between 'rationalization' and 'closer.' The rationalizating (for me) is our understanding of the situation.

It has an air of hipness and coolness, it gives you perhaps a persona of lithe story-maker, but it lacks the depth of the human condition. — schopenhauer1

It is seemingly hip, but then I also played at being a rock star once. I have hipster roots. Most of the others from those days have become fairly moral-political-liberal. They don't want to hear about the evil or greed in all of us. They don't like my 'cold' tendency to understand without judging or the respect I have for what is 'true' or important in the egoist vision. In short, it's too hip for the aging hipsters I know, as a general rule. The parents especially are identified with the good, social justice, responsibility, progress.

Of course I can't agree that my version of it lacks depth. But don't forget that this ironism holds itself loosely.

And as you admitted, not all is contingent. — schopenhauer1

Indeed. 'Everyday Dasein' is lived by the 'they.' Only the top-layer is sophisticatedly non-contingent.

I agree in a sense that you can posit your point of view, but you cannot make it a law. — schopenhauer1

Right, so we feel a common restraint or duty to respect the other's freedom. I think Hegel applies here. The 'master' can only be satisfyingly recognized by another 'master.' For me we have something like incarnate freedom that wants a very high notion of friendship (that of 'kings' who recognize the limits of their realm and co-participate in a notion of virtue, allowing for non-central differences.) For Blake this is the 'forgiveness of sin,' which I read as an embrace of difference. An old line: we are bound by our desire to bind.

Well, your little parenthesis here kind of negates your previous liquid stance. — schopenhauer1

Well I won't claim that my stance is perfectly liquid. It melts at the top, with a foundation of the undeniable common sense that we call sanity. Language is received like the law. I can't get behind my past completely. I suppose I don't think in terms of a crystalline set of systematic propositions but rather in terms of a network of metaphors. I was just re-reading Kaufmann's translation of Hegel's preface to the phenomenology and (with new Heideggerian notions at hand) saw it in a fresh light.

This isn't Kaufmann but:

What is “familiarly known” is not properly known, just for the reason that it is “familiar”. When engaged in the process of knowing, it is the commonest form of self-deception, and a deception of other people as well, to assume something to be familiar, and give assent to it on that very account. Knowledge of that sort, with all its talk, never gets from the spot, but has no idea that this is the case. Subject and object, and so on, God, nature, understanding, sensibility, etc., are uncritically presupposed as familiar and something valid, and become fixed points from which to start and to which to return. The process of knowing flits between these secure points, and in consequence goes on merely along the surface.
...
Analysis of an idea, as it used to be carried out, did in fact consist in nothing else than doing away with its character of familiarity.
— Hegel

The first part must have influenced Heidegger. For me 'liquidity' refers (as a start) to the instability of the concepts that we tend to 'compute' with as fixed points. For me it's not a crystalline network but something slimy, more or less liquid.

Then there's this, a little further down:

The life of mind is not one that shuns death, and keeps clear of destruction; it endures death and in death maintains its being. It only wins to its truth when it finds itself utterly torn asunder. — Hegel

I just like that, and I think you will too.

Of course, my rhetoric in this setting is going to be ramped up here more than in everyday life, as it is a philosophy forum where views like this can be tested, contested, and argued about endlessly. — schopenhauer1

Same here. I'm actually quite reticent on the deep stuff in my everyday life. I self-consciously embrace keeping my own counsel as 'grand style.' I used to be more combative, more of a big mouth, an ethical socialist. It never felt quite right. That's why cognizing this ethical socialism as such (the work of 'freedom') was an insight for me. It felt right. It felt 'authentic.' The shoe fit, so I starting wearing it.

I don't think this characterization negates the pessimist's stance, it's just descriptive. Okay, the pessimist is the clarion call, providing the Promethean tragic knowledge. So what if that is what is going on? Does that affect the message? It's just that this Promethean message is closer to what is going on ;). The other Prometheans are just false prophets :p. — schopenhauer1

For me it wouldn't involve negation. I passionately identified with truth seeking when, for instance, I read the first part of Beyond Good and Evil and found it convincing. I don't deny being hugely influenced by Nietzsche. It didn't mean that I was no longer interested in the truth, but only that this pursuit had become self-problematizing. So 'ironism' for me isn't about negation. The whole right-wrong framework is itself held more loosely. Is the kangaroo righter than the kuala? So I don't think you're wrong or that I am refuting pessimism. I'm just making a case for the value of a more neutral position and ultimately playing the exhibitionist.

How does the rebel revel in his ironic teasing, if everyone embraces the ironic teasing as a truism? — schopenhauer1

you are entertained by trying to thwart other philosophies with irony ;) — schopenhauer1

I don't deny a certain 'divine malice,' but for me it's not primarily ironic teasing. That would be a 'hardening' of the position into something fixed and mechanical. I think the anxiety of influence (Harold Bloom) is central here. We might say that there is no ironist-in-general but only the type of the 'strong poet' waging the 'war against cliche.' The strong poet is exactly he who does not want to be just a type. (Of course I wouldn't be 'ironic' in my own terms if 'ironism' was important to me as a label. There is a behind-word-ness here that is central for me. The terms are draped over something like an intuition --but this intuition is maybe just a liquid-network of concept. It's a table with hundreds of legs. If it's ultimately conceptual, no particular term is too precious to abandon. The 'feel' of the whole is what's important.)

This isn't an argument so much as a poetic description of perhaps our situation. — schopenhauer1

Since for me rational frameworks have ultimately irrational or rhetorical foundations, I understand poetic descriptions to be primary. 'Poetry' or 'productive logic' institutes the very frameworks in which arguments can take place. For instance, Popper's falsifiability criterion for science. I love it. But is this criterion itself science? Or something like pre-science?

In what sense would our sensations be exhaustive of the tree? — apokrisis

Isn't this all just the usual disagreement about terminology, though? We don't report seeing the tree with all of this metaphysical baggage in mind. We don't mean that we see the tree exhaustively. We don't think of matter in spacetime. We think of the tree in the shared everyday world, a green thing that grows, that can chopped into firewood, enjoyed for its shade, or used as a landmark. The more complicated attitudes about the tree are (seemingly) erected on this foundation. My own self-consciousness of taking this tree in the 'ordinary way' is itself one such complicated attitude, thematizing what is otherwise just the dim background of common sense.

We can say that the way we see the tree is a function of our human as opposed to spider's cognition. We might instead say that we see a representation of a tree, but I find this awkward. It's think it's better to go with just seeing the tree, aware of course that there is interpretation/mediation in this seeing. But for me there's a gap between arguing for a least awkward expression and adopting this or that -ism.

On this issue I'm coming from a Feuerbachian perspective. 'Intuition' is not the perfect word, but it's not wrong either. God only makes sense as something to worship or revere in terms of his ultimately human predicates. For instance, it would be absurd to worship a powerful alien invader whose motives we could not understand. We might obey and fear, but this would be a sad form of religion.

As far as 'intuition' goes, that connects to how we want to conceptualize the experience of value. I like the word 'feeling' as less metaphysical. Understanding religion in terms of knowledge claims (making it about epistemology) obscures the feeling that gives it whatever life it has --at least as I see it.

They have to maintain themselves, entertain themselves, all the while encountering negative interactions along the way. Why create these circumstances of dealing with, producing, and consuming for this new person? Sentimentality of life doesn't seem to justify this at all. — schopenhauer1

It's true that parents throw their children into struggle. They plop them down on the roller coaster without asking them first. Some will give you a metaphysical answer to the why. Others will give the esthetic answer. I'm not a parent so this is theoretical for me. But isn't sentimentality in terms about an overall feeling about life central here to either position, yours or theirs? I think there's a dialectic between thinking and feeling. We might agree that 'reason is rhetoric' or 'rationalization' in the hands of something darker. Representation is the tool of will or care. But this must be haunted by irony, since the notion that 'reason is rationalization' calls itself one more rationalization.

Note that I'm not saying you are wrong. I defend/present a certain undecidability, but I don't present this undecidability as binding on others but (with a certain distance) as a first-person report. I don't deny that there is a sort of imposition in all philosophical dialogue. There is a wanting-to-convince, something imperial, a 'fight for recognition.' But awareness of this gives it a different flavor.

You were forced into the duties of daily life or into the decision to kill yourself. That is a fact. Thus the alternative to antinatlism is creating this situation for a new person, and then having all the post-facto sentimental gymnastics (like the ones you are using, including Nietzschean style equivocating). — schopenhauer1

I agree that we were forced into duties, trouble, vulnerability. But for me we are also forced into 'post-facto sentimental gymnastics.' As I see it, I 'confess' that that's what my position is. As I read you, you half-way confess this. Perhaps you can clarify. Is it the metaphysical truth or do you understand it as the best 'rationalization'?

Birth forces the need for contingent worldviews, so yet again necessity of life's circumstances bypasses your idea of contingency. We disagree, not all is contingent. — schopenhauer1

To be clear, I never asserted that everything is contingent. Only the 'upper levels' of interpretation have such freedom. The daily world of trucks hurtling down highways is no place unbounded fiction. It's the 'global' interpretation that's contingent. I focus especially on the image of virtue at the heart of an interpretation. I'm very Nietzschean in this regard. Look at how a system/interpretation places the individual in a hierarchy. For me this tends to be the gist. I'd interpret both of us as variants of the 'knowledge-hero,' since we esteem ourselves and others in terms of what they understand. I can't really speak for you, so I'm just sharing a perception.

Also, I just had to provide this quote. It is probably the most pessimistically searing ones, I've read, and I've read a lot of them. — schopenhauer1

A great quote. I'll tackle a few lines of it.

hould you conclude that life is objectionable or that nothing matters–do not waste our time with your nonsense. We are on our way to the future, and the philosophically disheartening or the emotionally impaired are not going to hinder our progress. — Thomas Ligotti

This is dead on. Some will sugar it up, but there is an 'evil' march to the future that leaves the 'wounded' behind.

If you cannot say something positive, or at least equivocal, keep it to yourself. Pessimists and depressives need not apply for a position in the enterprise of life. You have two choices: Start thinking the way God and your society want you to think or be forsaken by all. The decision is yours, since your are a free agent who can choose to rejoin our fabricated world or stubbornly insist on…what? That we should mollycoddle non-positive thinkers like you or rethink how the whole world transacts its business? That we should start over from scratch? — Thomas Ligotti

For me the 'we' here deserves analysis. If I show up to work, I've decided to play the game, be good, do my duty, maintain the structure of my life. The same applies to my coworkers. A dark joke can go over quite well (I've tried it), as long as it doesn't have the 'feel' of compulsion. If I doggedly attempt to convert someone on the job (to pessimism or ironism), they'll experience this as a violation. Work is 'not the place.' But the resistance is individual. There's no sense of the we apart from the shared insistence of individually not-having-to-hear-it at work. That kind of talk belongs between trusted friends. It's too intimate for work. It's fraught like discussion of one's sexuality.

Lighten up or leave us alone. you will never get us to give up our hopes. you will never get us to wake up from our dreams. — Thomas Ligotti

This is the basic metaphysical move, the distinction between illusion and reality. The countermove would be to present pessimism as a nightmare. I'm neutral, or rather my dream is that it's all dreams a the contingent/optional apex of a worldview. But I believe my dream, and the distinction of dream and non-dream is part of the dream of metaphysics. All these terms 'melt' upon analysis. They aren't fixed. The are caught in the 'liquid' dialectic.

(Again, the foundation of the worldview is non-optional immersion in a common-sense that makes metaphysical theorizing possible.)

The fact that we have to cope to begin with is the problem. — schopenhauer1

Life is (arguably) a problem to be coped with and an opportunity for play. Life is a problemtunity which we cope with by seeing as play and play with by understanding as coping.

Anchoring is the "fixation of points within, or construction of walls around, the liquid fray of consciousness".[3] The anchoring mechanism provides individuals a value or an ideal that allows them to focus their attentions in a consistent manner. Zapffe also applied the anchoring principle to society, and stated "God, the Church, the State, morality, fate, the laws of life, the people, the future"[3] are all examples of collective primary anchoring firmaments. — schopenhauer1

I like the theory of anchoring. It's vaguely what I mean by 'image of virtue.' Stressing the social aspect seems to align the pessimist with the 'Satanic'/Romantic individualistic rebel. I love the old rebel. My own philosophy evolved from the image of the rebel. But language being so social suggests to me that any earnestly presented metaphysical position (including Zappe's) is a claim on the norm. Earnest metaphysics attempts to justify the imposition of a new norm (ethical socialism.)

Sublimation is the refocusing of energy away from negative outlets, toward positive ones. The individuals distance themselves and look at their existence from an aesthetic point of view (e.g., writers, poets, painters). Zapffe himself pointed out that his produced works were the product of sublimation. — schopenhauer1

I respect Zapffe for understanding himself to be one more 'poet.' But for me this is just an inch from ironism. If I myself am poetic sublimation-anchoring-rationalization, then how can I cling to the dream versus reality distinction in the traditional way?

Ones who say that life's contingent and structural harms are real, and thus life itself is no good. However, they have their happy little coping strategies — schopenhauer1

For me the success of these happy little coping strategies would endanger the 'life is no good' position.

You used the word accepting. — schopenhauer1

Yes, accepting the 'guilt' or the 'evil.' I can't speak for you, but I think lots of dark positions are 'righteous' in a certain sense. I sense in them a frustrated desire for purity and innocence. Accepting guilt and finitude is accepting the bloody hands and not-having-chosen-one's-self that comes with life. I understand resenting the burden of accepting/adaptation/adjustment. The dream is to be one's own father, self-created. I think God is a pretty good image of the massive pride in man. It's an indignity to be vulnerably and needfully embodied, but we only dreamed of God from within this indignity of finitude and guilt in the first place. (As always, this is just-my-adaptation, even I try to convey it persuasively.)

I think that in the strictest sense, meaning is defined as "what is meant". — Metaphysician Undercover

Right, but this doesn't approach the 'is' itself or what it means to mean. If meaning is what is meant, then what is this 'what' that is meant? We tend to 'move around' in a 'field' without noticing or questioning this field itself. What is intelligibility?

This implies interpretation. I believe it is important to keep these two senses separate, and not to equivocate, because the first requires an author, the second does not. So in the second sense, things have meaning to me which I do not believe have an author. Also, in communication there is often a difference between what is meant by the author, and what it means to me, due to difficulties in expressing, and difficulties in interpreting. — Metaphysician Undercover

For me this stays on the surface. I'm asking what it means for something to mean something in the first place, apart from the difficulties of communication and interpretation.

I do not think that "the individual" is an abstraction. I believe it is a logical principle posited for the sake of intelligibility, i.e.it is necessary to assume individuals in order to understand reality. — Metaphysician Undercover

I agree that the notion of the pure subject is basic to common sense. But you neglected to address the context in which I made this statement. We meet reality in terms of a language that is social, shared. So I am perhaps mostly 'us' in the way I unveil reality. Language is central here.

The unit is the basis for all mathematics — Metaphysician Undercover

I agree. There is a 'primary intuition' of unity. It can't be pointed to in the environment. It's 'there' in the way the environment is interpreted as 'circles within circles.' The parts within a whole are themselves wholes which can contain parts. The 'totality' is the circle we draw around everything. It's a digression, but I contend that this largest circle (the totality) has to be 'brute fact' to the degree that explanations are understood as deductions from postulated necessary relationships between entities. This unity is connected to that unity in particular way. The unity of all these unities can be related to nothing apart from itself, since by definition there is no such thing.

There’s resistance to the claim that this physical world consists of just abstract logical facts, but the un-defined-ness of “real” “existent”, and even “is”, should help to undermine that need for belief in the material world’s objective solidity, for a world of “is” instead of a world of “if “ …when there’s even something iffy about “is”. — Michael Ossipoff

Hell yeah. I'm delighted that we our views are closer than I thought at first. The 'iffiness' of 'is' is Heidegger's big theme. What do we mean by this 'is'? In some ways that's the fundamental question. But it gets obscured in our obsession with correctness. We forget to clarify what it is that makes correctness possible in the first place.

When I point out that no physical experiment shows that this physical world is other than a complex logical system, they’ll always answer that that means I’m proposing an unfalsifiable proposition. But the abstract logical facts, and complex systems of them, are inevitable, and could be “falsified” if someone could falsify their logical support. — Michael Ossipoff

I'd add to this the the falsifiability paradigm is itself unfalsifiable. The criterion for 'real' knowledge cannot justify itself. In general dominant frameworks of interpretation are invisible in their dominance. The more intensely the use them, the less we can see the 'decision' to use them. We are fish blind to the water in which we swim, 'inheriting' this 'water' as common sense.

The animal (including humans) is unitary, and the separation into body and “Mind” is only in the mind of philosophers of mind. …as is the resulting “Hard-Problem-Of-Consciousness”.
. — Michael Ossipoff

I like this, too. I'd go the extra step and de-presume the 'animal' metaphor. Of course biology has the 'right' to view man as a animal, but any particular metaphor 'locks down' the essence of being-there in a way that pre-decides. That man has tended lately to view himself as an animal among other animals is a contingent fact. Note that I'm not trying to say that man is instead a 'metaphysical' or 'theological' entity. That would be more pre-deciding.

Of course animals (including humans) are purposefully-responsive devices. …more complex than a mousetrap, thermostat or refrigetrator-lightswitch, and also differing from them by having been designed by natural-selection. …but still, in principle, purposefully-responsive devices like a mousetrap.
. — Michael Ossipoff

For me this is a partial truth, a pragmatic truth. The 'mechanical' paradigm is persuasive and valuable, but maybe it misses how 'being-there' opens up being in the first place or is this opening. Something more 'primordial' is being left out. I don't reject the theory of evolution or anything like that. My objections are phenomenological. I find the 'device' metaphor description of what-it-is-to-be-here incomplete.

I seem to remember reading something about “concern” being central to a living-being. That sounds like “Will”, and the built-in purpose of a purposefully-responsive device. But it was long time ago.
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…and something about a being-in-a-world. I’ve been saying that, even though we and our experience (or will) are primary, I don’t think that there’s something called Consciousness that can be there before and without embodiment in a world. We the experiencer, an animal, are part of (even if the primary part of) the possibility-world that is the setting for our life-experience possibility-story. — Michael Ossipoff

Yes, 'care' for Heidegger looks like 'will' for Schopenhauer. For Heidegger existence is something like caring interpretation or interpreting care. For Schop., it's will and representation. But Heidegger stresses 'disclosure' and the power of language to 'open' the field of being in a way that Schopenhauer does not. Heidegger's analysis of the 'being-there' that we are was 'on the way' to the searching out the meaning of 'is.' It is we who ask not only what is but what this 'is' is. It is we who can reveal ourselves to ourselves as 'just animals' or 'eternal souls' or 'consciousness.' Heidegger is trying to get 'behind' all these pre-decisions to look at what 'in' us makes them possible.

Yep, in terms of our purposes, and all as that if-then network. Scientificism has it all wrong metaphysically, putting all the emphasis and priority on fictitious objectively-existent things. — Michael Ossipoff

I concur.

Ok, that’s true, and, in general, it’s necessary to find out that our inner conceptual narrative about description, naming and evaluation gets in the way of actual experience.
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Also, I should add that one thing that contributes to gratitude for benevolence is when someone finds out about the goodness of what metaphysics says.
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I find that the metaphysics that I’ve been talking about implies an openness, looseness and lightness. That’s at least partly what I mean by the goodness of what is. — Michael Ossipoff

I love all of this. That 'openness, looseness, and lightness' is also at the center of my thinking.

That is why, for example, values nowadays are almost always understood through the prism of Darwinism, i.e. as being in service to survival. There is no objective good, beyond the pragmatic and utilitarian. — Wayfarer

If I may interject, I think 'almost always' really just applies to a few radical philosophers and scientists. As I see it, we need only look at political speeches and popular culture to get a sense of dominant values.

Cartesian anxiety, as characterized in that passage, is just one species of ontological anxiety. In whatever flavor it happens to afflict us, ontological anxiety gives rise to a sort of hope that the anxiety will be cured by a corresponding ontological certainty. It won't cure the illness to shift hope from one object to another, from "science" to "metaphysics", from "evidence" to "revelation". Cure the thing at its root: Relieve the anxiety without any appeal to vain hope or bad faith. — Cabbage Farmer

Well said. Though I speculate that different approaches work for different people. I relate to the above, but it's so rarely embraced that maybe it just doesn't feel right for most to embrace a certain groundlessness.

By speaking about them, we bring these particular phenomena to the attention of others. This way of informing other minds about circumstantially private experiences indicates the public character of subjectivity. — Cabbage Farmer

Right, but some attempts to share phenomona fail. I think there are limits to the publicness of subjectivity, especially in the individual leaps of insight that perhaps never become public --or not until a different individual shares the 'same' insight an a public finally ready for it.

To all appearances, we acquire knowledge about the world noninferentially on the basis of introspection, no less than we acquire knowledge about the world noninferentially on the basis of exteroception. Introspective and exteroceptive awareness are two sources of empirical evidence and two bases of empirical judgment. According to our nature, we coordinate sights with sights, sights with sounds, and exteroception with proprioception, interoception, and introspection. The prima facie synthesis that comes to each of us whether he wants it or not, may be extended by rigorous empirical investigation and by modest accounts of the results of investigation in keeping with the balance of appearances, in the manner of Gassendi. Or that natural synthesis may be extended any way you please, jumbled by carelessness and leniency, distorted by fantasies and legends, bloated by hopes and fears. — Cabbage Farmer

Great paragraph. You make me want to look into Gassendi.

If you've given any reasons for thinking that religious and aesthetic beliefs are not "understandable as being able to be inter-subjectively assessed in terms of "correctness', as empirical beliefs are", then I have not caught wind of those reasons. It seems to me you have yet to clear up the meaning of the claim, and I'm not sure what in your comments counts as a reason to support that claim. — Cabbage Farmer

If I can jump in on a theme I like, I propose that certain spiritual/aesthetic beliefs revolutionize the very notion of correctness. The idea that 'being objective' or 'making correct statements' is or should be the dominant understanding of virtue can understood as merely contingent. For a long time now I've loved this portrait of Christ by Nietzsche:

This faith does not formulate itself—it simply lives, and so guards itself against formulae. To be sure, the accident of environment, of educational background gives prominence to concepts of a certain sort: in primitive Christianity one finds only concepts of a Judaeo-Semitic character (—that of eating and drinking at the last supper belongs to this category—an idea which, like everything else Jewish, has been badly mauled by the church). But let us be careful not to see in all this anything more than symbolical language, semantics[6] an opportunity to speak in parables. It is only on the theory that no work is to be taken literally that this anti-realist is able to speak at all. Set down among Hindus he would have made use of the concepts of Sankhya,[7] and among Chinese he would have employed those of Lao-tse[8]—and in neither case would it have made any difference to him.—With a little freedom in the use of words, one might actually call Jesus a “free spirit”[9]—he cares nothing for what is established: the word killeth,[10] whatever is established killeth. The idea of “life” as an experience, as he alone conceives it, stands opposed to his mind to every sort of word, formula, law, belief and dogma. He speaks only of inner things: “life” or “truth” or “light” is his word for the innermost—in his sight everything else, the whole of reality, all nature, even language, has significance only as sign, as allegory. — N

I reach for phrases to describe this position like a 'negative theology of feeling.'

Then there's the wicked "Irony" described by Hegel in his lectures on fine art:

...[M]oreover this virtuosity of an ironical artistic life apprehends itself as a divine creative genius for which anything and everything is only an unsubstantial creature, to which the creator, knowing himself to be disengaged and free from everything, is not bound, because he is just as able to destroy it as to create it. In that case, he who has reached this standpoint of divine genius looks down from his high rank on all other men, for they are pronounced dull and limited, inasmuch as law, morals, etc., still count for them as fixed, essential, and obligatory. — H

Both perspectives seem to involve a distance from any mere proposition, and these are 'spiritual' positions. While correctness must matter in practical affairs, 'spiritual' propositions (the 'highest' kind) can only be 'the word that killeth' or 'ironic' respectively.

On atheism, it seems me, we are just animals, and anything goes. You don't try to read morality into the animal world. — cincPhil

This move from atheism to 'just animals' is (as I see it) trapped within an unconsidered framework. You basically split the field into theism and scientism, since you seem to be identifying atheism and scientism. There's no more reason for an atheist to take the biological interpretation of the human more seriously than he takes the traditional religious understanding of man. In my view we humans are always still interpreting ourselves and the world we find ourselves in. One could argue that the concept of animal is therefore not even stable.

It's true we don't hold animals to human standards. But that's because their nature seems relatively fixed. We humans however are constantly revolutionizing what it means to be human. We are the 'animal' that largely fashions its own nature --an ascending spiral as opposed to a circle. For this reason the 'animal' conception of man is suspect when applied metaphysically.

Do you apprehend at least a loose set of objective moral values, such as love, freedom, equality, tolerance, etc? Now, what if society as a whole decided to replace them with greed, narcissism, bigotry, and malice? Does that mean that those things are good? In what possible world is malice good? Don't some values seem necessary, like love for example? — cincPhil

Malice would be good in precisely the world of your hypothetical society, which we arguably find offensive from the perspective of this society. But most of would probably agree that culture can only oppose our social instincts so much and no further. The idea that there is no definite metaphysical ground of our decency or current understanding of virtue can be unsettling. But, as I argued before, God doesn't obviously provide such a ground. The notion of a metaphysical ground is questionable in the first place, as I see it. It sounds better than "it's just the way we do things," I agree. But is this God more than a projection of the society agrees is virtuous in the first place? Is God just the idea of a metaphysical ground? Less solid upon analysis?

I insisted that Apokrisis has this turned around, what constrains interpretation is the habits of the individual who is interpreting. In relation to interpretation, the words are just a passive thing being interpreted, and the interpretation depends on how the individual recognizes them. So all constraints on interpretation must be in the mind of the interpreter.

Apokrisis turns final cause around, such that it is not associated with the will and intent of the individual, but it is supposed to be the function of some phantom being, called "society", as if society has its own intentions and thereby constrains individuals to do what it wills. — Metaphysician Undercover

I think I know what Apo had in mind. The 'pure' individual is an abstraction, just as 'pure' society is an abstraction. Yes we have (practically) distinct bodies, but we swim in a language picked up through interaction. The foundation of our interpretative software is social. That which me might associate with the 'pure' individual is something like a fresh, top 'layer' of the interpretative software. The great poet, scientist, or philosopher makes an interpretative leap that can slowly 'seep down' into to the lower, shared layers of interpretation. 'Irrational' metaphors become literal, common sense.

So the brain-mind is an individual piece of hardware running largely social software. That's why constraints are (arguably) to some degree constrained by a 'phantom being.' As I see it, the 'pure ego' is arguably just a deeply embraced interpretation of what it is to be there. IMV, meaning-being is prior, though I understand that practically it's justified in thinking the primacy of the "I" that experiences meaning-being.

I find this so very hard to understand. Antigonish. — Banno

But do you really?

It's not a public object and yet it is something. Antigonish. Words summon phantoms into conversation, like what it is like to be a bat, or what it is like to read this thread. — Banno

For me this "phantom" metaphor suggests a contingent perspective. A phantom relative to what? Is spacetime a phantom? Is an understanding of the scientific method a phantom? Or is this method just symbols that clever monkeys involve in their publicly visible actions?

In what way is the something that it is like different from the perfectly public exercise of reading the post? — Banno

I don't think the something-that-it's-like is different from reading the post. But I disagree that reading the post is a 'perfectly public exercise.' I can record you (in theory) staring at a text with a video camera as evidence of this staring, but this staring at symbols is clearly not what is referred to by 'reading.' Do you not at all find the disavowal of 'consciousness' a little disingenuous? I'm not defending 'mind' here, that's what you're imagining. I also like cleaning up 'language on holiday.' But from my point of view you're being the metaphysician here, clinging to an artificial paradigm.

Why is it "greater" to know, love, and be powerful, than not? — Thorongil

Exactly. That's where what we already understand as virtue comes in.

So why do we need to create more socially-constructed selves to view the world and run around restlessly? There is none. It is creating more doing socially-constructed selves for the sake of it. This is aggressive absurdity that has to be enacted through incarnation of yet another individual who has to take the mantle of living an aggressively absurd life of instrumental doing. — schopenhauer1

I think we can agree on the absence of a "metaphysical" answer to this "why." It seems to me that conscious procreation at least involves at least an implicit decision that life is good --or that the child's life will likely be good. Probably lots of secular types think in terms of the rollercoaster metaphor in the movie Parenthood. Life is a ride, an experience. It's a mixture of bad and good. It's likely "worth the trouble," a parent decides. This roller-coaster metaphor arguably includes the absurdity-consciousness. Life is not "fundamentally" about anything in particular. It's a piece of music that some think worth hearing, even though some of it really sucks. (I stay neutral for reasons already mentioned. I don't defend life-in-general. I currently like the "music" I hear more than I dislike it.)

Ah, but somethings can never die into contingency and will stay necessary. — schopenhauer1

Right. But "apparent" necessity is just that, apparent. For me, for instance, anti-natalism as an 'objective' position is optional, contingent. It's a form of ethical socialism, the projection of a duty-for-all in terms of a truth-for-all.

Rather than being a lithe spirit floating on the content of this or that belief system, what is it that is going on with the human condition at its root. — schopenhauer1

I think we agree that life is 'care' or 'will,' but I interpret that care or will to have a height-seeking nature. So I look at the general tendency of a world-view or personality to assert its dominance or priority. My own theory of transcendence is of course one more move in this game. For me it is"freer" than other positions. Root-seeking is maybe the general structure of 'deep' thought. What is the deepest truth? The most basic nature of man? We seem to agree that 'will' is a word that points at this, though we disagree on the structure. Both of us interpret the other in terms of our own fundamental concept. This is of course compatible with my concept, since it is a theory of the dialectical/rhetorical clash of contingently established worldviews. (It's ironic because it recognizes its own contingency or groundlessness without thereafter becoming 'faithful' or 'objective' again.)

I always said my pessimism was an aesthetic one. It is seeing an image of the structure of the world and finding consolation somehow in understanding this. There is no embracing the absurd (pace Camus) or Eternal Return (pace Nietzsche). — schopenhauer1

For me it's about accepting the entanglement of the 'the divine' in the thorns 'down here.' It involves accepting the 'guilt' of being alive. In Siddartha the ferryman contains the murderer and the prostitute as 'subselves.' I think in terms of harmonization as opposed to purity. We agree on 'coping,' but this word does have a non-neutral slant. 'Play' is appropriate for many ways of being. 'Play' collapses into 'coping,' and successful coping leads back to play.

The goal-seeking, restless nature is there, whether you have the aesthetic view of it or not. It still happens, even if people cannot see it or interpret it like that. That is where we probably differ. You don't have to recognize it for yourself for it to be happening, to be a truth if you will. — schopenhauer1

We agree that existence is goal-seeking, I think. You experience your view as a universal truth that at least suggests the duty to abstain from procreation, while I am neutral or agnostic about the value of others' lives in general and therefore apolitical on this issue. More locally, I believe that those in my peer group are more happy than unhappy, but I like to think they are above-average in terms of coping-play. It's arguable that there is an inherited baseline emotional valence that invisibly distorts this whole issue. What if pessimists tend to be wired for less pleasure? That could be an unrecognized truth as you mentioned above. I don't know.

But that is just naming - "A something". it tells us nothing about it, does nothing to it or about it... — Banno

This "nothing" was brought to attention so that we could call it a nothing, though. Were you not just 'handling' this "it" as an intelligible if ambiguous entity as you questioned its existence?

Indeed, it looks to me like reification. Is it the same "something" the second, third or forth time I read it?
Then is it a something at all? — Banno

It is a reification. It (the experience) is grasped as a whole, as a thing carved out from its background. As for the problem of indexicals, that's in Hegel too. He was denying that thought had an outside. He's right that thought has no "conceptual" outside, but that's trivial. The idea of that which is not an idea is of course just an idea. The otherwise indeterminate "something" or "here" or "now" is determined by context. I eat "this" bread, not the "this."

But what is this thing which is called "information", which is supposed to be somehow independent from the act of informing? is it just the form itself, or is it something other than the form? — Metaphysician Undercover

I think the everyday understanding is that information is "meaning." But what is meaning? And what is the "is" here? I suggest that we approach the irreducible with these questions.

Not only intermingled but (until the expression terminates) deferred are the meanings that gel to constitute this sentence. I'm suggesting that plucking individual forms out of this intermingling, deferred flow is already a reduction-for-convenience of what it is to think. I suppose "forms" are the "atoms" of thinking, yet these forms don't "snap together" in a simple way. The whole is greater than the parts. Can we get behind this meaning-making? I think we can make it more conspicuous. We can peel off our unwitting projections of what it "should" be.

I understand the urge to demystify, but isn't this urge itself subject to demystification? I can only guess at your view, since you aren't contextualizing your objections. But I think you have an analytic background?

As I see it the Scylla and Charybdis are muddying the water further on the one hand and pretending that muddy water is clearer than it is on the other hand. To me that deferment of meaning is noteworthy. There is "something that it is like" for you to read this, a 'voice' in your head. This is invisible. It's not a public object any more than seeing redness is a public object.

I can understand not bothering with non-public immeasurable experiences. That all hinges on what one understands as intellectual virtue. I think phenomenology is an interesting direction for philosophy. I like the "productive logic" that makes aspects of the world as we already know it more conspicuous. It thematizes the methodological blind-spot of (physical, public) science, "consciousness" or "meaning" or "being." Phenomenology is a "science" in terms of being a method of knowing, though I'm not so in love with the word 'science' to care much whether it is so recognized. For me the emission of objective statements is not the essence of being human.

Is there even such a thing as the meaning of the sentence? I doubt it. There is only what we do with the sentence. — Banno

I do appreciate the "use" perspective on language, but I find it implausible as a final truth. I agree that "saying what meaning is" is no small matter. Intelligibility is somewhat ineffable. "The sign is that ill-named thing, the only one, that escapes the instituting question of philosophy: what is it?" We answer what-is-it questions with signs, with meaning. We can zoom out and see clever monkeys buzzing and making marks on paper. We can adopt a reductive, behaviorist perspective. But would we not be doing so as a retreat to a more productive method? To make things easier? Afraid of wasting our time? Those are reasonable motives, but not (for me) conclusive.

Meaning is. But what does 'is' mean? I see the "danger" or questionableness of this quest. I get why Heidegger and Derrida are iffy.

First of all, great post. I really enjoyed it.

Ok, thanks for clarifying that. Of course that’s Atheism. I don't criticize someone else's position--to each their own. …and you aren’t one of those preachy or evangelistic Atheists, who comprise most Atheists. — Michael Ossipoff

I'll grant that it is what most would call atheism. But I have an understanding of language that "problematizes" the atheist-theist distinction. The "divine" is "real" as a certain kind of feeling that is related to a certain kind of thinking. A "negative theology" is beyond an obsession with concepts and objectivity. I'm glad that you see that I'm not preachy. In a way, I'm trying to be the opposite of preachy. Yes, I'm sharing my ideas. But one of the ideas I'm sharing is the (possibiliy for others and reality for me ) of the transcendence of understanding religion "scientistically."

But I suggest that conditional grammar is at least as accurate a description of our physical world. A world of “if”, rather than “is”. — Michael Ossipoff

Right. I can relate. "Nature" is an abstract system of necessity. If this now, then that later. If this here, then that there. It's a conditional causal nexus.

Because “Real”, “Existent” , and “Is” aren’t philosophically-defined, I suggest that there isn’t really a meaningful issue between Realism and Anti-Realism. Neither is absolutely right or wrong.
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So I refer to a complex system of inter-referring inevitable abstract logical if-then facts about hypotheticals that is an individual “life-experience possibility-story”. …of which there are infinitely-many.
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I say that, for us, it’s most meaningful to speak of us and our experience as being metaphysically-primary.
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You’re in a life because there’s a life-experience possibility-story that’s about you. ,,,about someone just like you, with your basic subconscious attributes, inclinations, feelings etc. …about you. You’re the protagonist in that story.
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It certainly empirically makes sense for us to define the metaphysical world based on our experience, because, for one thing, everything that we know about this physical world comes to us from our experience. That’s what there directly observably metaphysically is, for us. It’s reasonable, natural and right for us to speak from our own empirical point of view.
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Nisargadatta said that we didn’t make our world, but we make it relevant.
. — Michael Ossipoff

I can especially relate to the above. To make experience primary is to be phenomenological. I want to describe what I see "accurately," and this involves looking "around" the pre-interpretations that hide what's really just there. We inherit all kinds of metaphysical views that we swim in without noticing. Intent on proving an objective truth that justifies enforcing our will, we usually distort the object. Even the usual subject-object paradigm is arguably a distortion/abstraction. For the most part we are what we are doing. I am the typing of this sentence as I type it.

Nisargadatta reminds me of Heidegger. We don't experience beings or entities in some neutral way. They are lit up in terms of their significance for us. To exist is to care.

I agree that we also exist largely as possibility. As we actually experience it, the world is "haunted" by possibility. We don't gaze on objects. We see objects in the first place terms of what they make possible. It's only a particular scientific mode that strips these objects of the "film" of this possibility. I'm not against this mode. I just think this mode is bad metaphysics. It throws too much away, unconcerned with describing what is just there.

Sometimes the famous philosophers say things that confirm or agree with what I’m saying, as when Wittgenstein was quoted as saying that there are no things, only facts.
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And, if they say something that I disagree with (as Tippler and Tegmark have), then I want to comment on that difference too.
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For me the "divine" only makes sense as feeling, as a mode of being alive. I do think this mode is supported by the "right" kind of thinking, but "feeling is first."
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Certainly, though my impression of good intent behind what is, benevolence above metaphysics, is an impression, with nothing to do with logic or argument. But it’s an impression that I don’t doubt.
. — Michael Ossipoff

Yes, you remind me of the TLP Wittgenstein. I also agree that the "divine" is not about logic and argument. But I'd make the Hegelian point that we have to get to that understanding through logic and argument. It takes logic and argument to clear away the association of the divine with logic and argument. A metaphysical understanding of the divine is a pre-interpretaion that we inherit.

I also don't doubt it. It is "there." But what this is is is slippery. I'm OK with that. "Ironism" is "behind" words, although it can only emerge dialecticallly from within words.