And this I take as what Emerson is referring to as conformity, and Wittgenstein labels “grammar”(the ordinary criteria for judgment), and what Rousseau is calling the social contract, the general will. — Antony Nickles

I have a very soft spot in my thoughts for Emerson. Philosophically I think lacks discipline, as with my favorite, "Nature"; he sort of toys with Platonism and casually constructs a metaphysics. But it's not that he is wrong, for this isn't the point. He invites us to think and experience like mystics, and imagines how this would go. It is his walk on a bare common and being glad to the brink of fear, and standing before nature like a transparent eyeball! This is not philosophy, but is more aligned with pseudo Dionysius the Areopagite or Meister Eckhart, but with passion.
But the Witt, Rousseau, is not quite the thinking. In Discourse on Thinking, Heidegger gives us a picture of meditative thought, something threatened by the mentality of modern technology, which tends to reduce meaningful encounters with the world to a "standing reserve" of utility (Hartmut Rosa's Social Acceleration was inspired by H. Things today are far worse than he ever imagined). His gelassenheit is something like this:

That which shows itself and at the same
time withdraws is the essential trait of what we call the
mystery. I call the comportment which enables us to keep
open to the meaning hidden in technology, openness to the
mystery.
Releasement toward things and openness to the mystery
belong together. They grant us the possibility of dwelling
in the world in a totally different way. They promise us a
new ground and foundation upon which we can stand and
endure in the world of technology without being imperiled
by it.

(Memorial Address from Discourse on Thinking)

For Heidegger the general will is "the they," which is what we first encounter in the process of enculturation. It is here that we "forget" our essential self. Meditative thought is a reduction of this to a phenomenological ontology.

I think Heidegger gets some things astoundingly right (because Kierkegaard got them right).

And of course, as there are similarities, there are divergences (though more interesting ones because sensible in being closer). In its openness to “interpretation”, I think it is important to note there is a “when” this happens (as not all the time), and forms, structures, “grammar”, rules, morals, etc. (what I take you to mean by “IN the context of its own contingency), in or from which a divergence is only even possible. However, each thing with its own structure, measures, considerations. Thus “the giveness of the world that is not language and culture” only enters into some situations, and those do not involve my interpretation (as science’s results are the same for anyone following its method), nor always my experience (neither the opportunity for it nor because I am always “experiencing”).

And so, the criteria and circumstances of the life of the self (which may not, or not continually, happen), work and are measured in totally different ways (as pain is important to us in my response to you being in pain). This is not in my interpretation of culture (though that is a thing), but in my relation to it: pushing against it, bringing it alive again (as it can be dead also). Thus the importance of this instant (go now! Emerson seems to say), and the “power” Rousseau claims it takes, to claim my self (my future responsiveness) as authority, for example, over what we are to call “right”, how to measure the (common) “good” (as Plato could not with knowledge, as Kant could not with logic). — Antony Nickles

The idea of hermeneutics is a bit more radical than this. To know is to interpret. This is really the basis for all the fuss about post modern thinking, for (see Derrida's Structure, Sign and Play. For Derrida's link to Heidegger I found Caputo's Radical Hermeneutics very useful) there is nothing at all that can be said that is free of a context, for contexts give meaning its center, its meaning assignments. Outside of language's contexts, nothing at all is to be said. I suppose for Wittgenstein, it would be outside of a language game, we pass over all things in silence (as with the Tractatus). It is right to say that basic to something being said at all is structure, grammar, etc. But then, this idea is as well contextualized to the context of talk about what grammar and structure "are". Nothing escapes deconstruction, this endless deferring to other contexts of discussion to explain what one is talking about. There is, in Rorty's terms, no final vocabulary, like something engraved on stone tablets by God. The word rests, every iota of it, on metaphysics, and metaphysics is nonsense, says Rorty. Not just a bad idea, but just GHHJK#^&*&*. Saying as I did, that everything rests on metaphysics, is just nonsense. For him, only propositions can be true of false, and there are no propositions "out there".

I agree and don't agree. Rorty just couldn't see knowledge without language. I think language is the setting for knowledge without language. What is non propositional truth? An excellent question. Hard to say...heh heh. This is why I read Michel Henry.

I take it Wittgenstein is the one thought to be only describing “a senseless abstract idea”, which is the common misunderstanding that he is concerned with language, and not that he is looking at it—specifically: what we say, when… —as his method of understanding the world (and our interests in it, what is essential about it).

Nevertheless, the “radicalness” I claim as our self’s stance to the conformity to our culture (what Wittgenstein will see as the criteria for judging each different thing, the current possibilities of its “senses”, as in: versions). Some take Wittgenstein as defending common sense, or solving skepticism, but this misses his discussion of the extension of our concepts, the seeing aspects of a thing (as it were) with a force against the norm. Though not a “metaphysical” me, but constitutive of me (a new constitution); not a “presence” of the world, as if a quality, like an imposed “reality”. Derrida and Marx thought tearing down the ordinary would was necessary to reveal a new relation to the world. Nietszche says that our morals needed to be made alive again, or reconsidered, by a new human, a me in a new defining position to the world. — Antony Nickles

Philosophers talk a lot about this. The argument, as I understand it, comes down to the very simple insight that we cannot speak the world, for meaningful language requires requires predication. To say "I am" as a reference to stand alone being is nonsense because in order for a proposition to make sense one has to be able to imagine it not to be the case. Talk about being as such, not being red or being a teacher, but just stand alone am-ness, if you will, doesn't have a meaningful contradiction possible, for there is nothing that one can imagine that "is not". If nothing is being predicated of X, then saying X is makes "is" an entirely vacant concept. I think this is the idea.

Witt called "the world" mystical. And he flat out refused to talk about ethics and aesthetics in basic terms, because all of this leads one the intuitive givenness of things that is not reducible to any possible explanatory context. I think of it in terms of Derrida's difference/differance that constitutes the "trace" that is this kind of emerging quality of related meanings. Calling something a fence post doesn't really have the power to make a true singular reference. Such singularity is impossible, and this makes a mess out of science and knowledge claims in general.

I’ve read “What is called Thinking?”, in which I take Heidegger as examining that thinking is not the violent imposing of a set requirement (the “egoistic” idea of trapping the world in a word), but being drawn into, passively submitting (as you say, “yielding”) to, what he says “calls” to us about a thing, which I take as the difference Wittgenstein makes between explanation and description, or looking at our ordinary criteria as evidence of what is attractive about a thing, it’s “possibilities”, as what is essential. And when you say this is not a “finished matter” I take it as to the future of a thing, but also to the ability of our extending our practices, our judgment, etc., and that this is the true realm of the human, that we take up and thus which defines us. — Antony Nickles

Right, Heidegger was the opposite of the kind of rigor of assumptions found in technology and science (though he makes pains to say he certainly not anti science). This openness is the nothing (derivative of Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety. Reading this latter one sees exactly where Heidegger got some of his major ideas) of pulling away from beingS. Fascinating, at least to me.

Haven't read What Is Called Thinking, though I do have it, because I have everything he wrote on pdf. Wittgenstein's explanation and description sounds familiar. I can say description is the way the world "shows" itself, logic and value are shown (given) and have no explanatory possibilities at the basic level. One cannot talk about logic since it is logic doing the talking. What is required is a third pov to explain logic, but then, this would also require yet another pov to explain it, ad infinitum. Nor can one explain suffering. It is simply there, and saying "simply there" makes good sense in many contexts; but when I say it to talk about pure givennes of pain, I am talking nonsense, says Witt. The Tractatus is nonsense itself for bringing it up, so he says.

Rorty is a big fan of this kind of thing. Everything is contingent, period, he says: truth is made, not discovered. He was very fond of Wittgenstein and Heidegger. Derrida, too.

It has always seemed to me that when talking about the self, it is important to get clear about the difference between the subject, or that which is experiencing, and the content of experience. A story one tells oneself about oneself, or any conception or representation of oneself one might have, is not the subject, but rather content. It is a structure of thought, not the one that experiences having a thought.

What Descartes was saying, in my understanding, was that whatever I am thinking can be false, but I myself cannot be nonexistent and yet believe that I am. Whatever story I tell myself or that appears in my mind can be erroneous. Its claims might not correspond to reality. But I myself, the thinker itself, that which experiences having such possibly erroneous thoughts, cannot be an illusion. Everything I see might be a hallucination, including my own reflection in the mirror, but I myself, the subject, cannot be an illusion. Even if I am deceived, I am having an experience, and so I am. I might be wrong about my form, but I as long as there is experience, however false, there is an experiencer. It is inconceivable that a nonexistent entity might be fooled in any way whatsoever, and that includes being misled to believe that it exists.

A stage magician can lead an audience to believe all sorts of false things. But one thing the magician cannot do is convince a nonexistent audience that it is there watching the show.

So there are two things that people seem to be talking about when talking about the self. Communication often fails because people think they are talking about the same thing when they are not. One is the subject of experience. The other is some kind of structure of self-representation, or a form of experience. One is awareness, the other is content. One is seer, one is scene/seen. It is important to make clear what we are bringing into question then when we question the self. Is it the subject itself, or the self-idea? — petrichor

But the issue that moves further on from this is, why "I think"? Why not I believe, I feel, I care, I sense, and so on? And then there is the issue of thinking: Thinking is one thing, thinking about thinking is another. So when I am going about my usual business, I am not aware that I am thinking when I do my taxes or plan for an event or wait for a bus. I am simply doing my taxes, planning and waiting. The "I" only steps in when one stands apart from activities and posits itself. There is no "I" doing taxes, only the doing of the taxes. The I exists when it becomes an object of thought. The point is that this I never really makes an appearance at all in the analysis of everyday affairs. And when one pulls away from these to posit the I, one is no longer identified with any of this about taxes or planning something.

The real question is that when one makes this move toward the I affirmation, is this an existential move, or is it just an ordinary change of attention? It can be taken as a dramatic move toward the Real, for one thereby steps out of any possible particular object relation, and into an object free state, for the I is not presented as an object at all. It is the "presence behind" the inquiry. If such a presence is Real, it is NOT a typical case in the natural order of relating. It is a step into metaphysics.

This is true, but I am claiming that there is a crucial, essential part of the self that is different than a claim to knowledge, though also related to the "historical dimension" of "language and culture"--what I am calling our "conformity". — Antony Nickles

Well, did you not just "say" this? There is no escaping this nature of language as an historically evolving and contingent phenomenon (and talk about such indeterminacy, Derrida brings it all to another level). It is not, of course, that that what you say about conformity and this essential part of the self is not true; it is no less true then, perhaps, some social theory of the self or evolution. I mean it has speculative merit. But out of context, it is not as if the world is speaking what it is outside of propositional possibilities.

This is also a very interesting point of comparison. My Husserl being basically non-existent, I looked through the "General Introduction of Pure Phenomenology" where he discusses the, as I read it, "effecting" of the self--his term: "Ego" (p. 273). I see a connection in that he takes an act "effecting" the ego as separate from an act that does not (analogous to conformity; when nothing unexpected is happening or we are not at a moral crisis). Of note for me, he also sees the assertion of the self as an event, not a constant (in our "self"); that its "existence" comes and goes, lives and dies he says. — Antony Nickles

Husserl's move is Cartesian and it is worth looking into because of the nwo Husserlians like Emanuel Levinas, Michel Henry, et al, and keeping in mind that Heidegger would not have been possible without Husserl. Anyway, you might find this interesting from the text you mentioned:

.....a new standpoint must be available which in spite of the switching off of this psycho-physical totality of nature leaves something over—the whole field of absolute consciousness. Thus, instead of living naively in experience (Erfahrung), and subjecting what we experience, transcendent nature, to theoretical inquiries, we perform the “phenomenological reduction”. In other words : instead of naïvely carrying out the acts proper to the nature-constituting consciousness with its transcendent theses and allowing ourselves to be led by motives that operate therein to still other transcendent theses, and so forth—we set all these theses “out of action”, we take no part in them ; we direct the glance of apprehension and theoretical inquiry to pure consciousness in its own absolute Being.

Yes, he really did say that. What he calls transcendent is the world of things "out there," essentially Descarte's world res extensa-- things that are not me, and so epistemically transcend my reach. His priority cannot be the transcendent natural world, for this cup, this fence post, and so on, are themselves only accessed through what it is that connects one to these things. The self? It is the stream of consciousness that is intuitively and irreducibly there. This is the foundation for any knowledge claim at all.

And he goes on about his "intentionality" of connectivity. Most analytic philosophers have little patience for this line of thinking mostly because they are fed up with any hint of Kantian thinking.

Ego 'lives' exclusively in a new cogito. The earlier cogito 'fades away,' sinks into 'darkness'.... the Ego does not live in them as an “effecting subject.” With that the concept of act is extended in a determined and quite indispensable sense. ...the act-effectings make up the “position-takings” in the widest sense... [those] of negation or affirmation with respect to existential claims or the like would belong here.
— Id.

Although Husserl is elsewhere stuck in the picture of us as an internal constant and cause (my intending etc.)--which I hope we can avoid getting mired in--I take him here to be touching on the self as "affirmed" in "taking" a "position", which I take as analogous to a position in relation to society's judgments and criteria. — Antony Nickles

Well, it is the phenomenological method. Sounds like his Phenomeology of the Consciousness of Time. The value of this kind of thinking is, for me, critical for an understanding of the world. This method takes inquiry to subjective time where presuppositions of time are examined, that is, at the actual genesis of the moment's content which is laid out fully in Fink's Sixth Meditation. This thinking takes the self at its generative beginning, The self here "is the transcendental existence [Existenz] of the egological stream of life in the full concreteness of its living present. Again, the first thing that can be laid hold of in this concreteness is the flowing life of experience in its flowing present actuality." (Fink p.6)

I think the analytical direction of this is right. It is not the kind of thing Anglo American philosophy likes to think about, much to its detriment, for all claims must begin with the source if it is going to be responsible to philosophy (which is really the point, this inquiring at the most basic level).

Also note the image of "fades away", which is similar to Descartes slipping back into the "law of custom" and Rousseau's picture of silence as consent to the general will. This seems to match up with Husserl's "non-effecting" acts. — Antony Nickles

Non effecting acts? I think Husserl is here referring to hyletic data, the actual perceptual experience of the pure intuition. Kenneth Williford puts it llike this:

These data are “immanent” in consciousness; they survive the phenomenological reduction. They
partly ground the intuitive or “in-the-flesh” aspect of perception, and they have a
determinacy of character that we do not create but can only discover

Do not create, that is, "effect".

But this is a passing attempt to make a connection (I have more to read of his); I leave it to you to see if there is a ball to pick up in this regard. Thank you for widening the discussion. — Antony Nickles

And thank you for that Rousseau connection. I will look into this.

Phenomenology rules!

If this is true, it means, as a consequence, that what you said has a meaning exclusively inside your narrative, you are inside your narrative as soon as you think and talk. As such, what you said cannot be considered objectively true, because it is inevitably conditioned by itself. In other words, what you said is meaningless.
Consider that what I have written now, in this message, comes from agreeing with you: I started by saying “If this is true...”. As a consequence, you cannot object anything to what I have said, because objecting to what I have said would mean objecting to yourself. — Angelo Cannata

You have put your finger on the pulse of the matter. Consider how a physicalist's reality falls apart instantly, for if experience yields to a physical reduction, then the saying that something is physical is also duly reduced! It IS absurd to think this way.

I did say the narrative is the starting place, the historical narrative that runs through all possible discussion and defines the "potentiality of of possibilities" as Heidegger put it, for each. Narratives are open hermeneutically, but then, IN this openness we have to deal with the givenness of the world that is not language and culture, like this sprained ankle I have and its pain, or the palpable encounter (as Michel Henry puts it) of living and experiencing. Language encounters what is not language IN the context of its own contingency. This is where Wittgenstein feared to go, this "world" of impossible presence. Levinas was not so afraid, for he rightly understood that this radical other and Other of the world is the intrusion of a palpable metaphysics, not merely a senseless abstract idea.

Phenomenology is the final resting place of philosophical inquiry, where it doesn't so much rest as it invites one to yield (Heidegger's version of gelassenheit) one's egoic totality in order to attend to what is there for meditative thought. What is revealed is not a finished matter at all. Quite the opposite.

Even when you tell yourself your internal story, you cannot deduce that you exist, because, whenever you make use of the idea of existence, you are making use of the mental structures of your brain. You can never take control of these structures, because you cannot think of them without using them again. If you think that this is evidence that your mind and your mental structures exist, it becomes automatically evidence that you are using them and, consequently, you have no control on what you are talking about. So, at the end, talking about existence, even our own existence while we are thinking about it, is completely meaningless: as soon as you think it has a meaning, you are automatically saying that you are a machine that is manoeuvred by that meaning, so that you cannot say anything meaningful about what you are talking about. — Angelo Cannata

Keep in mind, Angelo Cannata, that any talk about mental structures also belongs that personal narrative. Structures? What structures? You mean the ones that are at the causal foundation for any talk at all? This is the consequence of suggesting some physicalist bottom line: what is physical is first the narrative about what is physical. A brain is posited AS a brain, then it fits into a context of understanding.

It begins with the narrative, or story, if you like: language and culture are the historical dimension of knowledge claims. The only hope one has to go further than this lies with phenomenology (the one true view?).

There isn't a case to make, that's just how pain is. That's also not what I am arguing. Some knowledge claims have a center, where it is irrelevant what you think or feel about them. Others do, like pain. Context changes pain and feeling, it always has since our emotions are dependent on stimuli among other things. You haven't really shown how it's not otherwise. — Darkneos

Our emotions are dependent on stimuli. But the hard knowledge claims of science you want to endorse are also dependent on stimuli. You "observe" the distant star with, after all, your senses. There are no relevant data about the world that is not like this. So at least the apprehension of reaches this level of epistemic authority.
But then, we are not acknowledging something like a star's quantifiable features, which is locked into a set of science's paradigms, are we. Something "interpretatively distant": For in empirical science, evidence is inductively produced, through repeated observation and consistency of data. Here, the data is immediately apprehended and not theoretically discursive. This is an important point about discussing ethics/aesthetics/affectivity (essentially all the same thing, says Wittgenstein. He is right): The feeling of burning flesh is not derived through a series of justificatory premises, as is, say, a proposition about time/space or plate tectonics. One doesn't "learn" this. It therefore has this extraordinary direct apprehension. Granted, we do study pain, write books about it, and the neurobiological events associated with it, but think: all of these studies are, if you will, products of discursive objective thinking and do not have the privileged status of immediate apprehension. And most importantly: any study has its sensory foundation on which it builds a complex understanding. All sciences presuppose sensory (I don't use this term. Too Kantian) givenness, and therefore, there is the claim that all science is analytically reducible to just this, as in Kant's, sensory intuitions are blind without concepts; concepts without sensory intuitions are empty.

Postmodernism has a use in the social sciences and literature, but not in science. Despite what they think not every truth is rooted in a cultural or social context. Also you're kinda just rambling now, not making much sense. Though no, that is not what postmodernists are saying either. To be honest I don't think the field ever recovered from the Sokal Affair. — Darkneos

Insulting talk about rambling has no place in a discussion. Don't be a child.

Heidegger and Husserl are not easy to read, and post modern thought, Derrida, Levinas, Jean luc Marion, et al, are all post-Heideggerians. If you think post modern thought is only good for literature, think again about writers like Maurice Blancho or Beckett. In calling up language, which constitutes literature, we are asked to study the very nature of the utterance itself, and the consciousness that holds it, repeats it, and further, it is surmised that consciousness IS language. This starts with Kant, actually, who never spoke like this, but opened space to infer it.
Science is a particle of language. And if you don't study what language is as a dimension of a conscious event, you will never understand the ontology of science. Keep in mind one thing: Time. If you are a pragmatist, and I think you said you were, then you have a means to move into Heidegger, who held a similar view. All knowledge is forward looking, and so science's claims are forward looking, i.e., temporal constructions.

My complaint is that there is no way out of this to affirm something beyond this. The world is Heraclitus', not Parmenides', you might say.

Sokel Affair? I think you looked up in Wikipedia: nasty things people can say about postmodernism and found something. One can do this with anything. It is not as if Kant through Hegel, etc., and then Derrida are thereby undone. This is the kind of mentality, this "let me Wikipedia that, or ask someone in social media" mentality that is killing intellect in this generation.

Read philosophy if you want to know what it is. None of this armchair juvenility. Stop posting and read.

I don't know and I'm not entirely sure it does, ask the Buddhists monks. Though they'll tell you there is no logic behind it and words can't describe it. — Darkneos

Buddihsts are like Wittgenstein: they are right about what they do, wrong that one cannot talk about it. See the Abhidhamma: It does talk about ultimate reality and has extraordinary things to say, that is, if you are a serious meditator. But it's analyses are mostly dogmatic, though, they may be right. Hard to say since one needs to learn Pali. But I noticed it doesn't have the rigorous analysis of Husserl's Ideas or Levinas' Totality or Derrida's Margins. You CAN talk about these things, but only indirectly, which makes the field difficult because this because the material before is obscure to language, and this is because of a lack of shared experience. They say tibetan Buddhists had/have an mysterious language filled with references to things encountered only in deep meditation.

This is still more rambling, whatever point you're trying to make here just seems lost. I don't think like this because there isn't really much value to it. Science isn't outside it's purview though. If anything it probably won't be long before we're able to explain everything since the brain is the root of it all. Neuroscience is certainly advancing faster and faster, though hopefully climate change doesn't get us before then.

If this is philosophy you're more or less proving my point about how useless it is. 5 pages of you typing screeds, going on tangents, and people asking you what the point is and still nothing. I'm honestly just convinced this is more ego stroking than getting at any point that is meaningful or useful, or both. It honestly reminds me of how I used to be.

I'll repeat, it just sounds like you want reality to be something it just isn't and won't be. — Darkneos

People don't read philosophy. That is why they don't get it. Simple as that. I have encountered some who, finding that they really know nothing at all about what they post , like yourself, are inspired to read after our exchanges. One reason why I go on. You may not admit it to me, but later you will perhaps read to see what it is you have been attacking so vacantly.

Have a lovely time with Heidegger. Rorty considered him, along with Dewey and Wittgenstein, to be among the greatest philosopher of the 20th century. Being and Time is literally life changing.

Later.....perhaps.

Nope, once again. There really isn't another way to put it, it's not unambiguously bad. — Darkneos

Again no, pain is not an absolute let alone and existential absolute. You really want there to be something solid don't you. Recent philosophies suggest pain to be an illusion and given what some monks can do there may be truth to that, or at least it seems so. — Darkneos

It's not, this has been shown to be false hundreds of times via science. — Darkneos

Yes it can. — Darkneos

He was wrong.

I'm giving short answers here because literally nothing you have given is some kinda core aspect to life, not even pain. Ethics and value are discussed literally every day, they aren't given they are made by us. Good and bad can be reverse and they often are.

Again, you REALLLLLLY want reality to be something other than it is and it's....just not. — Darkneos

But really, Darkneos, all this says is no. You have to come to grips with this and try harder to actually make a case. I can help you:

You would have to show how context changes pain and any affectivity at all, in the same way the knife's sharpess changes from good to bad given the context of its appearance. You see this, right? You are trying to make the claim that pain qua pain is context determined. There is a very good work on this by Stanley Fish in his Is There a Text in this Class: He argues that context makes the determination, and apart from this, there is no "center" of knowledge claims. All is contingent, just as you are defending here. A student asks if there is a text in the class coming up soon, but the prof is confused: does she mean text to be a textbook? Or is it the that the student left her book and is looking for it? Or, does the prof have a textual frame of reference for the way the ideas will be discussed?

You see this?: text, text or text, three alternative possibilities, each very different, ambiguously in play, at once! This is contingency, and it is the kind of thing post modern thinking is about, this loss of determinacy in foundations of meaning. Is the world not like this when language speaks it's truths?

I know you don't want to think like this, but I am guessing since this is a strain of philosophical thought that dominates our age, and really: it is on YOUR side of tis issue, that it might be useful to you the next time you you defend your, well, curmudgeon-ism.
Science doesn't think like this because it is thematically outside its purview. That is, it simply don't take up questions like this, just as astronomers do not take up basket weaving. It is simply not what they do. This is philosophy, an essentially apriori "science."

"Recent philosophies suggest pain to be an illusion?" Fascinating! tell me how works: how can it be that my toothache is illusory?

Think you meant historical there, even then it's still not true. But it can be mitigated for what it is, also suffering for the greater good is suffering differently, way differently in fact. — Darkneos

No, it's not. Not taken as it stands in itself. Context can be brought to bear, but this changes nothing regarding the occurrent pain. Your burning finger against the lighted match be matched against some competing utility, and contextually, one here may conclude it is right to apply the match. It may spare millions some unspeakable agony. But apart from an ethical context like this, the stand alone pain is absolute. The proof for this lies in the presence of the unmitigated pain itself and the failure to contextually change what it is.

Nor does the historical context have any bearing, for this as well cannot be shown to mitigate the pain qua pain. Indeed, nothing can, which is why it is an absolute; but more: an existential absolute! This is not like Kant's pure reason or causality (found in his categories, but causality is especially poignant--so easy to demonstrate intuitively). It is in existence itself, not as an apriori principle, but an apriori actuality. A Real with a capital 'R'.

A most important point in this: I am arguing that it is affectivity that is at the heart of what Truth and Reality IS. Affectivity of any kindcannot be mitigated or altered. Consider the idea of the "good" (which Wittgenstein, btw, called divinity). There are two kinds of good. What is contingently good is found in valuations about, say a good knife. A good knife is sharp, well balanced, etc., but then, what if the knife is for Macbeth? Then the sharpness is now a bad quality. This is called contingency, and this is the kind of thing you refer, I believe, to in your alternative historical settings. Ethical good and bad are very different. The good and bad cannot be reversed. It can be confusing in the entanglements of the facts of the world, but in direct and unambiguous cases, like your finger on fire, there is crystal clarity.

This is why Wittgenstein insisted that ethics and value cannot be discussed: They are IN the givenness of the world, and are irreducibly what they are. We can argue about contingencies, but not about ethics/aesthetics/value AS SUCH!

Given human history yes it is very possible to deny that is bad. — Darkneos

The pain is ahistorically bad. It cannot be mitigated for what it is, only how for how it stands against competing interests, and such things are, of course, variable among cultures. But the child, say, who suffers for the greater good, does not thereby suffer differently.

Say what you will but certainty is more a myth humans tell themselves because of anxiety. — Darkneos

But the matter turns to the notorious good and bad of ethics. Is it at all possible to deny a lighted match on living flesh is "bad"?

Synthetic apriori truth is tall order indeed. — plaque flag

Never been refuted, only ignored.

And certainty is nonsense regardless of what you think. — Darkneos

Yes, Darkneos, I am familiar with the philosophy of "Bah Humbug!"

I have "taken this question seriously" but what it come down to is all I have is experience and experimentation through experience. If that's not good enough then it sounds like a you problem. You say you're not denying knowledge o the world at all but honestly your posts say otherwise. — Darkneos

when you say you have taken it seriously, then what is it, exactly, taken seriously: who have you read and what do you think about what they said. Your refutation sound more like exasperations. But I don't find any real claims. Pls let loose your insights.

Understanding the fossil record has nothing to do with philosophy bud, that's all science. Dating techniques, looking at positions in the rock layers, stuff like that. Again you're just making this harder than it needs to be. "serious philosophy" just sounds like you stroking your own ego. — Darkneos

No, you miss the point: knowledge of anything requires inquiry into that thing. You don't inquire philosophically, therefore you don't understand its issues.

It is not about ego. It is about basic reading. You need to do this, then your anxieties on this will disappear.

The "Structure of consciousness", at this point I'm really starting to have major doubts about you (as if the primordial origin wasn't enough). The only philosophy of existence that is worth a damn IMO is ethics or how to live. As to the relation of the brain and the world, brain constructs a best guess of reality based on the input of the senses, that's what the evidence shows. — Darkneos

Yes, ethics. But how to live depends not simply on setting up a system for personal behavior: such a system needs a grounding in the understanding. Christians have a system, time honored and useful. But it comes with a metaphysics that is confused and dangerous. Philosophy is the tool to discover where things go wrong and how they might be reviewed and revised.
You likely have similar problems in the basic justifications of how to live, and I say this because you seem to be admitting that such a review is useless. Fundamentalists of all stripes think just like this, embracing foolishness, then reifying it in the public consensus.

Stuff like the Evil Demon, simulation, etc are nice games to play but they are useless to think about because they don't impact your life. — Darkneos

They certainly do impact your life if you want to understand things beyond what "people say". Descartes' evil demon is just to demonstrate a point, like Schrodinger's cat. Not just a game, but an illustrative game.

You're not really curious about this stuff, I think you're just looking to appear "smart" by asking "the big questions". I used to be like that. But after much experience I realized that a lot of the "important questions" of philosophy didn't really matter that much. — Darkneos

But that is just tough talk. Much experience doing what? Reading philosophy? Or just living? Reminds me of Thoreau who tested the wisdom of age by interrogating old people, only to find their years of experience was never a source of wisdom. Just disappointing bad thinking.

Again this just sounds like more ego stroking, I asked a while ago what the point is to any of this and you haven't given anything. You're all over the place, writing more than you need to, and deliberately being unclear in your communications (other posters are able to do it but you choose not to). This just sounds to me like you want to be special or unique for wrestling with such things. — Darkneos

Sorry you don't like my writing. It does belong to a different thematically oriented tradition. One has to read about this to see it. I put it out there unapologetically because this is a philosophy club, and as I see it, continental philosophy is what philosophy really is about. You've read Hume?? You should understand then that philosophical language can be tedious. Spinoza? Leibniz? And yet, no patience for talk about the structures of consciousness. This is just crazy.

I wouldn't say causality produces meaning, we do. It's actually a feature of our brains, we are meaning making machines. It's called pareidolia, it's how you can see a smiley face as a face even though it ain't really a face.

Not really sure what you mean by IN meaning or ARE meaning, it's just meaning. But then again heaven forbid you make yourself clear or explain yourself. My guess is that you are IN meaning when you think, you aren't meaning. — Darkneos

It is an important distinction: to be IN an environment implies that this environment is somehow outside or apart from one. I am saying, onw is not IN an environment like this in discussing experiential structure: Rather, one IS the the very structure one analyzes. It is a turning toward one's own existence for discovery, for, after all, the issue here is the relation between ME an that fence post, so what I AM and the distinctions that descriptively rise up when I try to make sense of something like "I experience a fence post" call for a sharp division between us. But is there such a thing? Does the traditional analysis of S knows P make any sense at all when it comes to identifying and releasing P from the justificatory conditions of believing P?

THIS is a very big question to philosophy. The fence post is "over there", granted; but my knowing is over here, on my side of the epistemic fence. What can possibly account for this? A fascinating question.

I mean it is obvious to everyone that we are limited in our ability to understand and know things around us. That all we will ever get is a close enough or good enough understanding of things, because you don't know what you don't know. I find it odd that someone so versed in philosophy doesn't understand that there are some problems that have no solution. Like the problem of solipsism, there is no way to get outside of your perspective so whether there is a world outside or not you'll never know and there's nothing you can do about it. Or Descartes about what can be known for certain, and you can't truly know if you're being deceived or not. There is a great degree of faith that comes with living after all.

And most people seem to do just fine knowing there won't be total certainty, because life goes on.

Curiosity is fine and all that but it does have to have a goal in mind and at times you have to be able to recognize when you simply can't. So far people have asked you what the point of all this is and as far as anyone can tell there doesn't seem to be one. It just goes in circles. — Darkneos

Well, speaking of circles, there is Heidegger, who I quoted earlier from his Origin of the Work or Art. A great passage where he puts the ideas succinctly:

But how are we to be certain that we are indeed basing such an examination on art
works if we do not know beforehand what art is? And the nature of art can no more be
arrived at by a derivation from higher concepts than by a collection of characteristics
of actual art works. For such a derivation, too, already has in view the characteristics
that must suffice to establish that what we take in advance to be an art work is one in
fact. But selecting works from among given objects, and deriving concepts from principles, are equally impossible here, and where these procedures are practiced they are a
self-deception.
Thus we are compelled to follow the circle. This is neither a makeshift nor a defect.
To enter upon this path is the strength of thought, to continue on it is the feast of
thought, assuming that thinking is a craft. Not only is the main step from work to art a
circle like the step from art to work, but every separate step that we attempt circles in
this circle.

Heidegger believes that truth is "made" but the engagement of pursuing truth is an openness that has extraordinary VALUE, and I emphasize this because in this value is the true foundation of human cognition, which is one way to put what I have been arguing. The circle is hermeneutics. The disclosure within this is momentous. This is my position. Observe the value/aesthetic/ethical dimension of our existence, and do not simply register this as a premise, but realize this is "the place" inquiry truly seeks!

A very strong philosophical position. I am saying that Truth is really an endeavor of affectivity. We divide knowledge into categorical parts to pragmatically address our essentially problematic confrontation with the world, but this has led to the current illusion that truth is statistical, logical, rational, while affect is altogether unwelcome in describing truth (indeed, emotion has historically been willfully ignored). This is patently wrong.

As to certainty: this is not nonsense. But only if you are interested.

As I listen to music I "know" implicitly the many contexts that are there
— Astrophel

I think I know what it is to know.
— Astrophel


Why is it, and what does it mean, that know is given two significations here? What do the scare quotes in the one but missing from the other, indicate? — Mww

When I listen to music, the knowledge is implcit, like when you walk down the street it is impliciit that the pavement will yield to your step and so on. You don't think about this, but you do know it in a justificatory way: a long history of walking down the street, the basic physics of physicality, and so forth informs the occasion.
When I say I think I know what it is to know, I am making a statement of a knowledge claim explicitly, not referring to things implicit. Knowing is a field of interest, like botany or knitting. I think I know what this is at the basic level.

But I just did! I said that the expression "I think that" can be replaced by "I believe that", which indicates a simple belief, not a "justified" or "true" one. — Alkis Piskas

I can't imagine a simple belief without justification, even if it is wrong. I mean, I truly can't conceive of this. Knowledge is supposed to take belief to a notch higher, for confirmation that P is true has to be established. This IS the trickiest part, for one has to pry loose from justification the independence of P, and this, I argue, can't be done: every attempt to affirm P constitutes an inclusion of the justificatory evidence that affirms it. The issue that haunts the whole affair is, "How do you know?"

But belief without justification? I don't see it.

But I explained that too, and I gave you an example. Besides, saying "something that is true cancels it being possible" is almost the same thing. This what "incompatible" means: impossible to exist together, simultanesously and in harmony, without conflict. — Alkis Piskas

Yes, but I am having trouble understanding this cancelation.

No, this is not what I'm saying at all. Saying "not possible" (negative) changes the whole logical structure. I said that if something is said to be true "it cannot be also possible". Please read back what I said.

I have the impression that what we are doing is straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel. And this can go ad infinitum.

I don't consider this as a constructive, fruitful or even meaningful discussion ... — Alkis Piskas

Well then, I'll assume the fault is mine. Apologies.

Not really. As to not to the point you don't really seem to have one but that's neither here nor there. Also it doesn't really "get into your head" so much as you are able to experience and act in it if you are conscious and active. It's actually really easy to conceive of it but you are making this hard than it needs to be IMO. — Darkneos

Well, this just says you haven't a clue. A bit like the Christian who insists through Jesus redemption arrives, but when asked how defers to faith.

If knowledge is justified true belief, and I am sure it is just this, and you believe "ability to experience" yields a justification, then show this. It is NOT that I am denying that we do have knowledge of the world AT ALL! It is rather that when you take this question seriously, you are forced to reconstrue everything everything you believe vis a vis basic questions.

Science itself is a form of pragmaticism to a degree. It's focus is on testable and observable phenomenon and then it tries to generate explanations about what's going on. Granted it won't ever be complete but it's efficacy so far seems good to me.

As far as anyone knows it does reveal the way the world is given what it has done so far. — Darkneos

Anyone, that is, who does not think about serious philosophy. If scientists never tried to understand the fossil record, we would not at all have a concept in place about geologic eras and their subcategories. This is what happens when one chooses not to think.

Philosophy's pursuit might be rooted in emotion but I fail to see how that changes anything. From where I stand no claim is useful philosophically because, in my experience, you can argue anything about anything and end up nowhere. If your claim can't apply to reality or affect my life in any capacity then it's kinda worthless. Otherwise we're just naval gazing, which is fine if it's just you. I also think you're just being deliberately obtuse as you aren't making yourself clear nor are you getting to any point from what I see. — Darkneos

No Darneos; you have it all wrong. This is because you haven't "read" your way into the discussion about the structure of consciousness. It is the only way into a philosophy of existence.

You should at least be curious as to the epistemic relation between a brain and a world. I mean, to have no analytic inquiry about this at all behind you, yet to come out swinging as you do....curious, and then some.

Incorrect, the world of our understanding doesn't rest on intuition, not even close. We simply take a few things as a given and work from there. I already explained that intuition isn't good as science shows the universe doesn't work according to it. If anything I'd wager it resets on experimentation, we try things and see what works.

I know objects can move themselves if I see they have a way to propel themselves without the need of some outside force to move them.

There is no reductive account of what experience "really is" it's simply experience. Neurons and signals and all that stuff firing and processing sensory data. We know the brain does this as we have a ton of evidence to back it, and so far nothing to the contrary. Your last part is just nonsense. The brain is just there, the phenomenon doesn't generate it.

There is no issue here you just want there to be one.

Again, this all just reads like someone who wants reality to be something other than it actually is. — Darkneos

Causality is apodictic. Try imagining its contradiction.

The brain: but there is the brain and there is fence post. How does this work, exactly, or even vaguely, such that the former knows the latter. You take a philosopher like Quine, one of my favorites because he was an explicit naturalist in the Deweyan tradition, yet so revered in analytic philosophy, and you find nothing but frustration when it comes to accounting for how it is that causality, which he takes as foundational in explaining the world, produces meaning; and this has to be taken as priority: when you THINK at all, you are not IN meaning, but ARE meaning.
But such questions that apply to this kind of thinking have to begin with curiosity. One has to be motivated by seeing the deficit in human understanding at the basic level. If you don't see this, you really have no motivation, and end up in the back of the class sleeping.

Question: why take this class at all?

The pain perhaps not, but is this any more convincing of a material reality than Dr Johnson attempting to refute Berkeley by kicking a stone? — Tom Storm

Or Moore's Here is one hand, or Diogenes against Zeno?

One has to draw a distinction between something like being "appeared to redly" and aesthetics/value judgments. Judgment itself is a contingent matter because language is historical and pragmatic, and these do not provide the basis for the strong ontological claim sought here, I mean the discovery of the Real that is entirely non arbitrary.
This is absolute, this non arbitrary phenomenon, and it is aesthetic/value dimension of our existence. The Really Really? It is the aesthetic/ethical: precisely what philosophy has always been making such pains to ignore!
It is a quasi-Cartesian argument, if interested.

If knowledge is without meaning then how are you writing this and expecting others to communicate? How do you even know there are others to communicate with?

I think it's as I said before, you're kinda searching for something similar to Descartes except he had to invent god to get out of his funk. But life doesn't work like that, nothing can be definitively known beyond all doubt, it just doesn't exist. Still total certainty was always a myth anyway and we never needed it before. — Darkneos

Not quite. Nothing can be known definitively? Put your hand in boiling water for a few seconds. Can this pain be doubted?

See above: How do you know objects cannot move themselves?

But I'm pretty sure that Kant said you CAN'T know truth through pure reason alone. — Darkneos

Yes. I did affirm this.

That said I'm struggling to find the point to any of this. If it's suggesting that what we take as knowledge isn't reflective of reality, I'd hate to say that doesn't seem to be the case. The world outside our heads might be different than that which we experience every day, but unless you can provide evidence for such a thing it's useless speculation. — Darkneos

Evidence of what? Evidence for the claim that the world outside our heads is not what we experience? Well, it's really not to the point. But since you asked, the world "outside" of one's head, how is it that is actually get into the head? I'm saying it doesn't because there is no way to even conceive of this. Therein lies the evidence: one way of justifying a denial that P to be true, to show that P is nonsense.

So far in my life everything I know seems to work out just fine and it's how we can interact and to some degree master the world as it is. Evolution may have evolved us for certain aspects of survival but I have no reason to doubt the world is what I see each day unless there is some dimensional break. — Darkneos

Keep in mind that if your belief that the world is what you see rests with "things working" then your claim would rest with pragmatics. Then you would have to show how pragmatics reveals the way the world is. That is, if S knows P, and to know is to be able to use for some purpose, then knowing is mere pragmatics, but what one knows IS the pragmatics and not the world

Generally science takes a stronger view than this, affirming the nitro's independent existence apart from the pragmatics we experience. But this, again has to be explained. I think it nonsense.

Though to be honest I've failing to see the point of your question or what you're aiming to achieve here since you're kinda all over the place. I'm guessing you're hounding for something that in reality doesn't exist, some foundational ground to make for knowledge. Hate to say it but there is no such thing. We take a few things as given, our axioms, and just hope for the best. — Darkneos

I can understand this. But a pragmatist like yourself should have an epistemology, just so your claims can be useful philosophically. Reread the things you object to, and consider the simple thesis that philosophy's pursuit of truth is REALLY an affective endeavor. So looking for truth as a propositional affair that only looks to facts is going to lead only to other facts and these the same. It is not about a quest for information about meaning. It never has been. This is the historical error that has made philosophy so intractable.
It has historically been the purview of religion to deal with value/aesthetics/ethics (the same thing in essence), and philosophy has been about analytic arguments at the basic level. I hold that philosophy IS the only authentic religion.

I will add that intuition isn't a special form of knowledge but still another form of cognition (something you seem to have a bone to pick with) as it is based on prior knowledge, culture, and personal experience. It's sort of like "thinking really fast". Even feelings are rooted in some form of cognition though not one you are aware of. Brains are weird.

PS: I do wonder if there is a way to write your stuff in a way that's easy to understand. — Darkneos

Not just a form of cognition, but cognition itself. After all, how do you know modus ponens is right? How do you know objects can move themselves? The world of our understanding rests entirely on intuition.

Talk about brains: perhaps hard to see this, but brains are supposed to generate experience, and thereby give a reductive account of what experience "really" is. This is what I infer from your thoughts. but how is it one knows the brain is there to be this generative source? Why, it is through the phenomenon of the brain which the brain generates.

You DO see the issue here, yes?

My understanding of Kant's idea is just that we understand new ideas by relating them to a unified body of pre-existing ideas about ourselves and the world. The "I think" is the idea of a transcendental ego or unity. Kant did not follow Descartes in thinking this ego as a substantive entity; rather our selves are models that seem unified to us in terms of a coherent story of the self/ world relation. All of this is transcendental insofar as it is not empirically derivable from observations of the world, but rather constitutes the very condition that enables observation and understanding of the world.

So, it is not a case of knowing the noumenal, but via reflection on our experience, of thinking the necessary conditions for the possibility of that experience. We know that if we did not have a coherent, unified sense of ourselves in relation to a world that we experience, we would not be able to experience and understand the world the way that we know we do. I might not be understanding Kant rightly, since I am not a Kant scholar, but that is my take on it... — Janus

This sounds reasonable, about Kant. But I would only add that the nature of what is noumenal cannot be grasped in our finitude. "Reflection on our own experience" can still give one no more than a representation. It sounds reasonable to make this move, but all of this presupposes the very thing that needs to be shown.

Kant knew this, and I'm sure you can easily find where he says this in the deduction and elsewhere. Transcendental means metaphysical, and what is "pure" reason is just this. Kant didn't do metaphysics (or did he? He certainly doesn't intend to, but his representational thinking sets up an epistemology and an ontology that is inherently metaphysical.)

I'm not a Kant scholar either. But I've read the Critique, and others, like you, I am guessing.

Yes, I have heard about that a few times. But this "No, no" implies that my definition was wrong and that only yours is true. Which is wrong. One can say, at best, that the your definition is acceptable too. But even so, the words "justified" and "true" are incompatible with "I think". The expression "I think that" can be replaced by "I believe that", which indicate as simple belief, not "justified" or "true". — Alkis Piskas

To me, this is a bit confusing, Alkis Piskas. I doubt we disagree, in the end. Pls explain how "the words "justified" and "true" are incompatible with "I think." According to the traditional analysis, knowledge is justified true belief. This, of course, has issues; big ones. but this lies not in the analysis being wrong, but in how we define and make sense belief, justification and truth. You seem to have something in mind on making sense of these.

"True" and "possible" are incompatible. If it is true that you have sent me this message, because I read it, it cannot be also possible, at the same time, that you did so. It would be possible only if I had not received or read it yet. — Alkis Piskas

Only if you think something that is true cancels it being possible. It is true that I had chicken for dinner. Are you saying it is therefore not possible that I had chicken form dinner?

If you look at possibility as a future possibility only, then when possibilities come true they are no longer merely possible. But the term is not limited like this. There is logical possibility, something that does not violate the principles of reason. Uttering modus ponens doesn't cancel logical possibility. Same for something being causally possible, and so on. It simply says something is possible within certain parameters.

Consider a thought as an image or a series of images. These are "objects" in your mind. You can perceive and observe them as you percieve and observe anything else outside your mind, in your surroundings. The only difference is that it is you who have created these "objects", which are images, whereas objects in your surroundings have been created by some other source than you.

I think that the following experiment will explain everything in the relation of knowledge and thinking and other things I have talked about. If this won't make sense to you, nothing else I could say would.

Just watch an object in front of you, e.g. your monitor, for a couple of seconds. Then close your eyes and think of what you just watched. You will create an image of the real object. This is what we call a thought. And the process of the creation of that image is what we call "thinking". This image is a representation of the real object and it may be very close to or very different from it, depending on your ability to recall. But there will be always a difference --however small-- between what you have actually observed (knowledge) and what you thought about it.
And this is the difference between knowing and thinking about something — Alkis Piskas

So you are saying the knowing lies in the open eyed perception, while the thinking lies in the encounter with the thought of that real thing that abides in memory or in the imagination? Is this right?

Were you a scientist or mathematician you might realize the desires, loves, pleasures, etc. arising from the practice of the profession. To the contrary these experiences give meaning to one's life.

But then all of this discussion falls by the wayside of actual physical experience. Go climbing. — jgill

But this is just to the point I am making. But you need to make a further step into inquiry: when you analyze a star's light and bring forth a conclusion there is beneath this, or presupposed by it, a structured consciousness that does the bringing forth of the basic conditions for "receiving" anything at all.
What makes science singularly disqualified for philosophy is that it doesn't look at the world at this level of inquiry. Nor does it thematically take up the caring and value that you raise here. As a scientist you do indeed have more or less strong interest, occasionally exhilaration. But it goes further still: to speak at all, to have a thought and draw a conclusion or affirm a conditional or negation is inherently affective. the point I make here is that it is these analytical conditions, which are typical in everyday living, tend to reify the categorical analyses, reducing the world to its own abstract image. The actuality, intuitive givenness of things, if you will, of putting the eyes to the computer screen, implicitly drawing conclusions, rejecting others, then, consummating an inquiry! At this level the experience is a singularity.

If implicitly yes, as do I, but…..a cow??? And a cow “thinking”. Is that different than a cow thinking? Maybe “thinking” is a euphemism for instinct. Dunno, but I seriously doubt a majority of lesser animals, if not all of them, have any conception of relative heights as a function of temptation. He goes to taller grass because he doesn’t have to bend his neck so far, not because its tempting.

I agree with you, in that I know what it is to know. One thing I know, is that I don’t know what goes on in a cow’s head, and therefore wouldn’t ever suggest anything about it. — Mww

Think of Heidegger's historical account of knowing. The cow has been grazing for years, say, and it looks up a sees what memory informs her to be 'good eating over there" but not conceptualized, obviously. She moves over there. To me, this bears the mark of reason's conditional proposition. A "proto propositional" response to an environment. Cow's have histories and memories and these inform "judgment". What makes us so different is language.

Absolutely. But that isn’t so much a Kantian fallacy as the prime example of the human disposition to think beyond its logical authority. As true these days as it’s ever been. — Mww

That "logical authority" is a loaded term. In the world, what authorizes logic, so to speak, is some kind of a posteriori presence, but this presence itself stands beyond classification. I hold that presence is metaphysics, and the latter is not some impossibly distant "other"; not impossible, but a "possible" other, meaning that metaphysics needs to be conceived as an essential part of our existence, the encounter with threshold of its concepts as they take on philosophy. The more philosophy "stays put" with its positivist priority of clarity in the familiar, the more distant it is from its own nature, which is openness. This openness is essentially affective, and so when we allow ourselves to face it, in the nothing, we face both the openness of the conceptual deficit as well as the desire or yearning that is IN the conceptual deficit itself.

In other words, we can't just think in some propositional incompatibility with a world that defies categorization, and we can't think all of this is off limits to "properly authorized' logic and thinking.

Yeah, the intrinsic circularity of reason herself. Nothing to be done about the way Nature made us. — Mww

I am suggesting that "the way nature made us" has been distorted by a belief that reason simply tapers off into the sunset of an impossible horizon, metaphysics. this kind of thinking takes recognized limits of established ideas to be authoritative existentially. My claim is that this occurs only when one ignores the affective dimension of rationality itself: It is wrong to think of rationality in terms of the abstract "authoritative" logic it produces. Logic is actually "of a piece" with affectivity, and the open ended nature of this is not the impossibility and foolishness of reason grasping beyond its means, but a desire that seeks consummation. Logic seeks, if you will, consummation in a valid conclusion, but this only part of what it does. Logics IS affectivity seeking consummation. The separation we routinely recognize is merely pragmatic and habitual.

I don’t think occasions of truth are antecedent to the philosophical idea of truth. How would we know a thing is true if we didn’t already know what form any truth must have? Are not universals prior to particulars? How could particulars be analyzed without the universal to which it necessarily relates?

If all truths are contained in propositions, and the simplest possible proposition that cannot possibly be false is the gauge by which all other occasions of truth would be judged, it follows that the idea is before the occasion.

I’ll grant that occasions of truth must be revealed for what they are prior to analysis of possible truths. — Mww

Well, no one ever said at any particular time, let's call this a 'bottle" and from then on we had propositions like "the bottle is missing" and "look, a ship in a bottle." The term emerged in a language as part of an evolving system. There is no real beginning to this.

Anyway, I said, "here, I say when reason conceives of what it is to be a "rational truth" according to its own model, it creates an abstraction out of reason. Truth as a philosophical idea requires actual occasions of truth to be revealed for what they are PRIOR to analysis, not after." The idea here was that when reason is set upon something to "understand" it, it tends to produce something of its own abstract utility, a conclusion qua conclusion, which is simply a logical function. This is obviously a very useful way to address problems, but it gives the illusion of logic standing apart from its existential grounding, which is filled with interest and palpable meaning. These are not separate experiences, but one and the same. A rational inquiry IS an affective inquiry, and affectivity IS rational (we are so constituted. As I listen to music I "know" implicitly the many contexts that are there, in the constructed experience of listening).

Yes, I've said as much myself, but that doesn't change the fact that the truth or falsity of the abstractive thought exemplified in propositional assertions is not the same as the idea of truth that Alethia represents; so I'm not sure whether you are agreeing or disagreeing with what I've said, or of what point you want to make. — Janus

Are you alluding to Heidegger's alethia? Well, I certainly do not subscribe to the impossible idea of there being something that can be known but outside of human dasein. The idea is absurd. He does bring mood, caring, pragmatics and other dimensions of our existence into philosophy, but the complaint is that he doesn't discuss ethics (Levinas, e.g.). But I don't think one can dismiss his historical analysis of knowledge claims. And I do share his nostalgia for poetry and his belief that modern life suffers an estrangement from something deeply important, keeping in mind that he was educated originally for service to the church, and this use of words like "destining" and others suggest religious meaning, and I do approve of this; but then, and this would be a big point for me: His thesis is bound to finitude. There is the notorious "nothing" encountered at the "edge" of the Totality of historical interpretative possibility. This he derives largely from Kierkegaard, who put the nothing and its existential anxiety into play.

I consider this "nothing" a very important part of the idea sketched out here. Take thought to its extremity, where words and their historical meanings run out, and one faces something extraordinary, which is the bare existence of the world that denies interpretation. This nothing loses interpretative value because it defies all rules meaning making, like Kant's "(sensory) intuitions without concepts are blind; concepts without intuitions are empty." The idea is that reality has to be construed as affectivity (inserting my concern) that is "of a piece" with concepts, and cannot be conceived apart; and the "nothing" presents an intuition that has no conceptual counterpart, but will not simply disappear in a puff of logic. Because it is IN our existence, and not a flight of conceptual fantasy.

But when you ask if I agree with you: Yes, the extent you agree with this brief bit here.

You haven't explained why you think Kant's Unity of Apperception is an impossible concept, what exactly Wittgenstein's complaint is and how it relates to Kant's idea, or what relevance Kierkegaard's philosophy has in this connection. You give me nothing to respond to unless you offer more than this kind of vague gesturing. — Janus

It is impossible because it is conceived by the very unities it presents to us. To talk about what the TUA is, we would need a third pov, one that is objective and removed from the conditions assume what needs to be shown. This, of course, comes from Wittgenstein (but I can't remember where, exactly). Logic cannot explain is own nature because this presupposes logic to do so. Like talking about the eye that "sees" the eye. A brain that conceives a brain.

The TUA is, after all, "transcendental" and noumenal. Kierkegaard I brought up because he was adamantly opposed to any kind of "rational realism". Wittgenstein's quasi-mystical position on the world and value can be found here.

Propositions are not necessarily "utilities", although they of course can be. The idea that the world is a "standing reserve", there to be exploited in whatever way we see fit, has no necessary connection with the fact that humans practice propositional thinking. In fact, the mutually contradictory ideas that it either does, or does not, have such a necessary connection are themselves examples of propositional thinking. Philosophy is impossible without propositional thinking, and that is why I say that it cannot capture the non-dual, non-discursive, affective nature of experience. Poetry is better suited for that task. — Janus

But I want to take a more basic look at all of this. I draw on "standing reserve" as a kind of objectionable reduction to something that divests human existence of its important foundational meaning. I am saying that philosophy with its endless discursivity is largely missing a big point. What is disclosure? Is it propositional? What is this? I think Dewey was right: the aesthetic/affective dimension of our existence cannot be separated from rationality and logic, and so when we make a proposition we cannot reduce this to a "fact", something on the logical grid that is imposed on a world. It IS the world; it has existence, and the most salient feature of this is its affectivity, its aesthetic/ethical dimension.

I am reminded of Rorty, who dropped philosophy to teach literature. Philosophy had become trite and repetitive and had no to say, but literature, this is existentially educational, putting forth the real drama of our situation in the world. But like Heiddeger, Rorty was committed to finitude and didn't understand religion. One doesn't encounter "nothing"' (see the above). One encounters affectivity (broadly conceived here as the "irrational" actualities we experience). The nothing is metaphysics. In metaphysics, I am saying, we encounter affectivity and its propositional counterpart, of course (otherwise I could not be writing about it).

Philosophy is actually what religion is: the encounter of affectivity "outside" of dasein, discovered propositionally/(historically, as Heidegger tells us). What Heidegger, Rorty and others fail to see is this existence is NOT confined to finitude. It is, apriori, if you like, eternal.

The problem is that I read this sentence and feel utterly unconvinced by claims that affectivity = truth. Do I trust this judgement? What’s the next step? — apokrisis

You feel unconvinced because you think you are being asked to believe that the desire or for or feeling about something is a truth all by itself, and this patently absurd, because truth belongs to propositions. This is not at all being said.

What is being said is the when we affirm, deny, question, discover, intend, and all of the cognitive expressions of human experience you can imagine, we are not, in the basic description of the event of "doing " any of these, simply trying to make ideas clear. Ideas are events in time that are inherently affective, and apart from this affectivity one thereby talks about abstractions of experience and not reality.

Science hypostatizes this quantifying dimension of reason, and gives us a picture of truth as factual truth, and facts are quantifiable and abide by the law of excluded middle, and do not bear the fluidity of actuality we see in desire, love, pleasure, hate, despair, boredom and the rest. This is THE existential complaint.

Such an abstraction belongs to the "thinking world" of AI, I would hazard. Truth never was this kind ot thing. It is always truth/affectivity in a single reality.

If you think you know then you don't know! :smile:

Knowing means understanding clearly and with certainty.
Thinking --in this context and case-- means considering something possible.
These two do not match. — Alkis Piskas

No, no; knowing is justified true belief, so says the standard analysis, but it is not wrong. And justification is essential to belief, and justification is inherently thoughtful. Also, if P is true, P is possible. This is analytic.

Indeed it's not thinking that creates knowledge, but not because the reason you give but because thinking and knowledge do not match, as I showed above.
That "the 'I' that thinks remains at a distance from that which is thought" doesn't mean much. You can equally say that I am at a distance from my memories, my emotions, everything created by my mind, consciously or unconsciously, intentionally or unintentionally. Yet, I am connected to them unbreakably. In fact, the thinker is the thought. — Alkis Piskas

When I say the thinking is at a distance, I am a bit outside the familiar discussion. One has to conceive of the cogito as first something as taken to be a rational center, a rational substance "res cogitans" as distinguished from "res extensa." But reason qua reason is just an abstraction and really doesn't exist, I claim. When I say "I" I refer to something, but that thing is supposed to be thought itself, which is nonsense. Not that thought doesn't exist at all, but its existence s discovered the same way other things' existence is discovered: through observation. What does one observe as one observes a thought? It is not only attended by affect, but affect is In the thoughtful observation: one is interested in observing, perhaps fascinated and overwhelmed, perhaps bored, and so on; but knowledge is never free of this. It is inherent to knowledge because knowledge (and thought) is an experience. I follow Dewey and others in this. But I leave aside Dewey's naturalism.

The distance in question is this: in language, the apprehension of things is inherently discursive. A word is not a stand alone entity, thus, when I notice a cow in a field, I am not facing in my understanding anything of a direct disclosure, since the language setting refers or "defers" to other thoughts, memories, feelings, that create a contextual understanding.All thinking and knowledge claims are contextual and not absolute, so if one is thinking at all, and knowing, and knowing is a strictly rationally conceived, then knowing is thereby an abstraction.

Distant from ones memories, etc. is right and wrong. On the hand, there is nothing more intimate than a memory as it rises up before you. It is an event like any other. But the distance is interpretative: when you start talking and thinking about it, what it is and how it is meaningful, you stray from this core experience into language and culture, and this is where Descartes' demon, if you will, inserts doubt, which here I am simply referring to the historical nature of language: language does not give one a direct and spontaneous disclosure; only an historical one, as language itself is a historical construct. It does not "speak" the world "out there".

For this kind of disclosure, one has to look to affectivity, also embedded in language, but then, affectivity "says" something entirely ahistorical: present experience. The historical language "meets" the present in affectivity. Both are essential to thought and knowledge.

I agree with the first. I disagree with the second. "Epistemic" means of or relating to knowledge or the conditions for acquiring it. And, as I shown, thinking and knowledge are incompatible concepts. — Alkis Piskas

You can't say "as shown." It wasn't. All knowledge claims about the world rely on justification and "to think" at all is inherently justificatory. What is the most reliable justification? this lies in the conditions of immediacy. A little like Plato's critique of art as their removed from their source, the forms. Well, I am no metaphysician like Plato, but where he puts the forms, I put intuited encounters with expereince, like a mysterious punch in the face, if you will: who did this? Why? Where is he?; and so on. But then pain, well, there is no discursivity of inquiry here. It may be taken up discursively, but pain qua pain is not.

Pain, affectivity being a general term for this dimension of our existence, is nondiscursive, and affectivity brings reason in line with actuality. To know is to feel, in other words. Again, feeling does not attend knowing. It IS the knowing. The distinctions drawn between the two are analytic and abstract and pragmatic.

I agree. I have mentioned in here and elsewhere that thinking is not prove that one exists. But I have also thought that maybe by "thinking" Descartes meant "being aware". In which case, he was right.
See, at that time the terms and concepts of "consciousness" and "awareness" were not developed yet. — Alkis Piskas

I think his "res cogitans" answers this. Thought qua thought is an independent kind of existing "thing." We are this.

This is a good point you have brought up. It reminds me of what imagination and intuition meant to Einstein in relation to knowledge:
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.”
.
“I believe in intuition and inspiration. At times I feel certain I am right while not knowing the reason.” — Alkis Piskas

But then, Einstein wasn't doing philosophy. To imagine is to bring forth established knowledge claims, often, in novel ways, and this is a creative imagining, which is what I think he was talking about. A better understanding of imagination would be an "openness": all of our thinking and knowledge claims are open to possibilities, and none are shut, which is dogmatism. i am claiming that there is a foundational nostalgia for closure, and this should be understood not simply as a rational quest for a proposition.al satisfaction. What inquiry qua inquiry seeks is a union between epistemology and ontology.

What if it could be said what thought is by what it does? If only this can be done by thinking, then the doing of this is thinking. If I think of, or cognize, a dog as fur, teeth, a tail, a nose, in a certain arrangement, and if fur, teeth, tails and noses represent conceptions I’ve thought, than I should be authorized to say….thought is cognition by means of synthesis of conceptions to each other. And its negation works just as well, insofar as if I cannot connect a set of conceptions to each other, then I have no authority to say I’ve thought anything at all. — Mww

I have no doubt at all that utility lies in the "saying"; or better, the saying lies in utility. Thinking is doing, and I think this right. Is all doing thinking? Implicitly, yes; I would say a cow standing in a meadow "thinks" when it sees taller more tempting grass. A kind of proto thinking, such that the conditional proposition, "I should move over there to access something better," is obviously not in place, but the conditional function is. Symbolic language comes "after," both historically and analytically, this rudimentary relation with the world.

I agree with this idea of cognition as a synthesis. Hard not to, really. But the point I want to make is that this cognition is always conceived apart from its, call it, native setting, and in this conception we are free to think clearly and abstractly, which is good, of course, for the utility requirement put before it. But this runs into what could be called a kind of Kantian fallacy, who in his Transcendental Dialectic argued that reason, left ungrounded in worldly confirmation, moves to inventing metaphysical nonsense: here, I say when reason conceives of what it is to be a "rational truth" according to its own model, it creates an abstraction out of reason. Truth as a philosophical idea requires actual occasions of truth to be revealed for what they are PRIOR to analysis, not after.

Philosophy that seeks Truth with a capital "T" and not just truth in utility based activity. And this Truth is essentially affective, but this is ignored by philosophers, who continually argue as if philosophy's greatest hope is clarity in plain facts. They don't see that what they are really looking for affective clarity in this affair, a consummation of affectivity, which has this powerful dimension to it, the very source of religious fervor and desire.

Philosophy is the very core of religion, to speak loosely.

We can assign, in the sense of feel, "truth value" in the affective. It has the sense of actuality, of truth in the sense of alethia or revealing (or "unconcealing"). The act-ual is revealed by acting, by affecting.

But this notion of truth is quite different than the idea of propositional truth, which applies only to statements or assertions. — Janus

Is it? When you think at all, thought is attending by feeling, but then, not just this: To say it is attended by feeling is to impose on the experience an order and determination it doesn't have itself. the categorical thought takes up the experience AS a propositional abstraction. It is an abstraction from an unquantifiable source, which is the experience itself, the actuality that presents itself for analysis.The features observed are taken up as categorical.
Kant's Transcendental Unity of Apperception is itself an impossible concept constructed out of the very concepts it is alleged to bring forth. Part of Wittgenstein's complaint in the Tractatus is about this kind of thing, which is why he was such a fan of Kierkegaard.

It is on account of this "revealing" of actuality which is everyday experience (when we notice it) that we can say that everyday experience is (or can be) a revelation. But this has nothing to do with discursive knowledge or explanation, because as soon as the attempt is made to describe this experience in our necessarily dualistic language the original non-duality of the actual is more or less obscured. I say "more or less" because I think the sense of non-duality, of the numinous, although not capable of description, can be evoked by metaphor, by poetic language (and of course by the other arts). — Janus

Or: It has EVERYTHING to do with discursive knowledge, but propositional knowledge is "reduced" to the properties generally understood as essential and exclusive of affectivity imply because the analysis makes it appear this way; and pragmatic rationality, call it, "works" when it is calmly done and reason can proceed in a kind or pure discursivity, free from rhetoric and distracting emotion, and this has real "utility" for getting things right in science and its more mundane setting, everyday living.

But then, to be a good scientist, we have to allow the object before us to stand as it is, which is why I refer to the notion of gelassenheit: one has to yield to the world, observe in earnest, to see what knowledge is, and this observation must be a clear as possible. I witness an occasion of knowledge and I see, as Dewey saw, that affectivity is IN the experience. It is in the "originary" condition. Truth of this and that is abstracting from this original condition for utility's sake. But as it is, as an observable phenomenon, "shown," that is, an original whole.

The reason philosophy is millennia old and still haunts inquiry in same ways it always has is because it has sought propositional knowledge exclusive of substantive affective "meaning". Proportions are pragmatic constructions as well as essential to understand anything, and even essential to being a person at all. But to treat a proposition as a utility, as I am now writing this, philosophically, is a reduction of the world to a utility. And this is Heidegger's big complaint in his Question Concerning Technology.

Following Peirce, I would argue any notion of truth is semiotic. And science now tells us that humans engage in semiosis at four levels of encoding or sign relations.

We engage with the world via genes, neurons, words and numbers. Or more broadly, we are neurobiological creatures first, but have become also sociocultural creatures as well.

And so I say you are confusing the levels at which we “exist in the flow of nature”. Neurobiology sets us up as affective selves. We respond to the world as we find it in “emotional” ways. We read our surroundings in ways that deal with our basic survival. Our responses are the physiological states and behavioural habits appropriate to that level of world modelling.

Then philosophy comes in at a very different level. It is based on the abstracted notion of universalised reason and the specific of measurement. It is based on the third person absolute detachment that we imagine as the God’s eye objective point of view that it dialectically opposed to our embodied, affective, subjective, first person point of view. — apokrisis

Well, since you brought up evolution, consider that at the current evolutionary stage, we are faced with a world constructed out of pragmatic responses to its conditions, and these are generally talked about in terms of survival and reproduction, or perhaps genotypical codes translating into phenotypical traits that have the requisite utility. Consider further that the very observational matrix we exist in is an evolutionary construct. My position is that this construct is that the very terms of meaning making are not "about " the world, but are "made" and the search for this aboutness is philosophy's aim. So: if all we witness is structured, even in the very generative basis of experience, then all eyes turn to this structure for basic analysis. Evolution itself is called into question, for it is an empirical theory about a "world" that lies outside the structural features experience, and this itself raises serious doubt as to soundness. One find Descartes Evil genius, not simply "knocking at the door"---for there is no "door' in the sense Descartes conceived of the world. This kind of talk is rightly dismissed today as nonsense.

And briefly, bringing up Peirce directs me to his complaint about Descartes, that the latter was lost in aimless apriority. But his analysis fails to understand the Cartesian move as a wedding of epistemology and ontology. Descartes thought the cogito was primary because its "ontological proximity" was absolute, and to think this is exactly way to think about epistemology. He was mistaken, but not for reasons Peirce stated. The key to foundational epistemology lies in the intimacy of "presence".

So one is facing a world that is first a construct that makes a world, not a mirror that receives something from beyond itself (again, something that cannot even be conceived in the imagination). As if neuronal activity could be "abou" anything, and worse, about even itself. Physical systems have no epistemic connectivity at all. Consider how the famous naturalist philosopher, Quine, who took up Dewey's chair, committed himself to the premise that the natural world and its physics (from physics, onward to other sciences) entirely failed to explain how meaning, its semiotics, its intentions, anticipations, doubt and affirmation, and so on, can ever be about what physics is talking about. Causality is not even remotely epistemic, that is, there is not even a working paradigm to suggest the possibility.

This is why natural science cannot be philosophy.

So in reality, as living breathing human beings also carving out space in social communities, we of course feel as well as reason. We see as well as measure. It can seem impossible to split off the neurobiological aspects of our semiotic organisation from our socialcultural ones. — apokrisis

Of course, this is right, as long as you don't think neurobiology is a philosophical concept. It "rests on" philosophical assumptions that go unnoticed unless one explicitly thinks this way. Philosophy is about the presuppositions of this kind of talk.

Yet the sensible definition of philosophy is just that. It is the attempt to reach the limit of detachment from the point of view of a creature rooted in embodied subjectivity.

Reasoning still depends on affect as we well know. It feels quite different to be certain vs uncertain. We get a feeling when something clicks and seems right - the aha! response — apokrisis

yes, Dewey's consummatory moment. It is inherently aesthetic. But this has to be recontextualized, out of a naturalist pov and into an existential one. The assumptions of naturalism are undone apriori: the concept of causality simply possesses no epistemic possibility.

But in the interests of fostering philosophical detachment, that is why we have come to lean on the pragmatism of the scientific method. We take claims of feeling convinced out of the equation as much as possible. We invent statistical methods to quantify our proper position on spectrums of certainty-uncertainty. — apokrisis

And IN the statistical occurrent claim there is the "aha!, for all experience has this. It is foundational, and to try to remove this from an what truth is in a philosophical discussion is a little perverse. When we think, we want to be clear, so let us be clear about what truth is and not reduce truth to an abstraction of purely logical clarity. This is a rationalist fallacy.

You have it right when you defend pragmatism's "forward looking" scientific method. But this does not welcome natural science into foundational philosophical thinking. It denies it.

We aim to feel no more strongly about some conviction than that of the response of the click of pattern recognition. We have been presented with some complicated puzzle. There is then some satisfaction in making the last piece fit to complete the whole picture.

So sure, truth isn’t just propositional. AP types got that wrong. Truth comes in its grades of semiosis. The body has to react in ways that are “affective” to be effective in its world.

But then truth as a game being played at the highest level of detached abstraction is understood as “other” to this embodied affectiveness. It is Peirce’s community of reason that aims for objectivity via the cycle of abduction, deduction and inductive confirmation. Make a guess at a general causal relation, deduce the particular logical consequences of that being true, then test to see how those expectations turn out in terms of numbers on dials.

Flickers on needles rather than flickers of the heart are the currency of rational inquiry. — apokrisis

Or, truth needs to be understood as the phenomenon that is there, descriptively available. The categorical universe contrived by reason's essential pragmatic function and definition taken as an exclusive foundation for truth is a fundamental mischaracterization, for this foundation is inherently affective, and clarity in truth recognition is not simply "making ideas clear." It is making the broad scope of experience "clear" and the MOST salient feature of this, is affectivity, and certainly not the very useful movement on a dial in a statistical gathering of information.

Aren’t the affective and reason joined precisely where affective purpose, relevance and desire meet rational validation, recognition and intelligibility? This is the basis of enactivist models of sense-making, wherein the anticipatory goal-directed pragmatic functioning of an organism defines its rationality on the basis of consistency of events with its aims and desires. Reason as relevance. — Joshs

Put it this way: Philosophers are certainly not in the business of discovering affective "truths".

I agree with this, but this revelation is commonplace; it is with us every instant of everyday experience, in that which exceeds our discursive understandings of what is happening. We just have to learn to notice... — Janus

It is not simply a matter of understanding that there is an aesthetic dimension to thinking, and experiencing. It is a question of HOW one therefore produces Truth, with a capital 'T'. I could say that a performance of Ravel's le tombeau de couperin possesses "truth" but in our categorical tendencies, we take this to be a kind of metaphor.
Truth cannot be conceived apart from the world (logical truths are vacuous, and really, not apart from anything). To see a llama in the road and construct a proposition about this is already committed to abstraction, that of the proposition, the assertion, the existential quantifier, a factual state of affairs, and so on; that is, UNLESS one considers the whole experience of which the proposition is only a part, conceived in a social context.

This may still sound rather mundane, but I take the matter to philosophy, where true propositions meet metaphysics: What is it to conceive of the llama encounter at the basic level of inquiry? Keeping in mind that the understanding is no longer bound to an abstract proposition. The hard part of seeing this is assigning truth value to affectivity. Analysis gives us the habit of dividing such things: there is not truth in aesthetics, and therefore foundation thinking is going to be inherently "dryly" propositional. Metaphysics is going to be seen as a violation of clarity, because clarity is defined apart from its existential counterpart, and not as a "clarity" of affectivity.

It is hard to think like this, to imagine the principles of reason as "aesthetic principles," that modus ponens is REALLY is an event! This is Dewey. But Dewey never made the radical move: The idea of metaphysics is an aesthetic encounter, a reaching to "affirm" a desideratum that exceeds the desire.

Principled thinking is not called into question. It is rerouted to self examination that asks what does "principled" even mean? It is desire, mood, yearning, "toward"; just as reason moves forward toward consummation, it moves forward toward affective consummation, and this is the aesthetic apprehension of metaphysics. Not a line drawn in the sand of Wittgenstein (who I admire very much) and positivists. Affectivity has no such line.

I asked, because you brought them up. I’m guessing you know what a can of worms they are, which makes me wonder….why bring them up, then do nothing with them. — Mww

You mean I should cut to the chase? I do find it a little puzzling that comments I made were in no way suggestive of "a mutually profitable dialectic." After all, the notion of an absolute of any kind should raise philosophical eyebrows. You must have views on such a thing, and my thoughts were just the occasion to bring them out, keeping in mind that one of the foundational ideas of analytic thinking is a radical rejection of metaphysics and to even mention an absolute puts the matter squarely in metaphysics.

The chase: ask. what is philosophy? It is inherently affective, and this is a very important point. To be philosophical is to address the world at the level of the most basic questions, and at this level the question turns to foundations, and foundationally, it is discovered that reason and its categories AS SUCH is an abstraction, merely. Not that priniples of logic are to be second guessed, but that what principles of logic really are, are affective events that are affective/logical/pragmatic in some inconceivable original. The "generative source" of the language that produces understanding is, as I write and think occurrently, is transcendental and not to be conceived itself as categorical, that is, as a product of what reason does.

Philosophy as an endless play of words finds itself in a kind of Derridaian loop of references that are contextualized and this contextualization has no end. Heidegger put it so well in his Origin of the Work of Art:
Thus we are compelled to follow the circle. This is neither a makeshift nor a defect.
To enter upon this path is the strength of thought, to continue on it is the feast of
thought, assuming that thinking is a craft. Not only is the main step from work to art a
circle like the step from art to work, but every separate step that we attempt circles in
this circle.

He thrives on the endless dialectic; so Hegelian. And he is right, I am sure. Philosophy is an "asymptotic" process, never to cross the final line to what it seeks. This is because philosophy conceived as "feast of thought" (and I put aside Heidegger's allusions to some determinate poetic grounding. I don't understand it all that well) and while it certainly is this, it begs the question, what is thought? It is an openness, and so forth, but thought is never simply thought; it is inherently aesthetic (see Dewey on this, though I don't think Dewey would for a moment agree with things I think are true), and what is this? Wittgenstein says we are out of our depths in a question like this. But here is the rub: Truth isn't, nor has it ever been, just a propositional affair (see Rorty, and, I guess, most analytic philosophers). To see a truth IS an aesthetic experience.

There is more to this, but I wonder if a mutually profitable dialectic has been encouraged thus far.

Agreed, in principle. What does any of that have to do with existential absolutes or foundational existences? I mean, you brought them up….I guess….in an attempt to lay the groundwork for something apparently about the world, but from what you’ve called our contemplative midst. I can’t seem to find a connection you’ve made between them, as yet anyway. — Mww

One has to ask what a foundational existence could even mean, first. Simple description comes first. description of the world at the basic level. Absolutes are not to be found in discursive argument. Rather, argument leads to something radically other.

And also keeping in mind that a word like 'absolute' has already corrupted the inquiry. I mention this only to make clear that references to something existential, in my thinking, takes one the the threshold where what can be spoken yields to what cannot.

As to "about the world": what is the world? I mean, when you use this term, what do you mean? What I mean by it is the Totality of our existence. By existence I mean all that is there, and interpretatively in play.

To purify one’s gaze makes none but metaphorical sense, but nevertheless observation is already delivered…..separated…..from presumptive thinking, which you’ve already granted, insofar as affective intuition is placed apart from cognitive understanding. — Mww

It is a problem to speak of it. One has to be careful, for language summons its own, so to speak.

Not simply metaphorical. It is a method of removing historically augmented thought from one's apperceptive beholding of the world. One is spontaneously inclined to deploy analytic thinking to solve a problem, it has become nearly impossible to engage is what could be called "gelassenheit", a term familiar to the Amish and others, but certainly it is not them I have in mind. Gelassenheit is a yielding to discover, such that the conceptual domination over experience is reduced to a kind of humility.

This is not religious talk. A natural scientist does this, clearly, and of necessity, as systems of thought are first responsible to listening, watching, taking in the world. Here, it is just a philosophical "taking in" which is not something the scientist can handle well, for the "evidence" to be observed lies not in the routine empiricism, but in the intuited underpinning of this. Which is ignored, generally.

Again, agreed in principle, overlooking the repetitive semantic disassociation (we in general face the world, but each subject alone, retains some original status). Still, no exposition of a relation between an existential absolutes and foundational intuitions. And yet the problem seems to be the loss of foundational intuitions and the subsequent recovery of them, or at least their status as such. But how can that be the case, in a systemic whole? Can’t lose a part then get it back and still have the system maintain itself. — Mww

That is, unless the foundational intuition in question is there not as a part at all. If I take your meaning, you are asking how some primoradial intuition can be conceived by a agency of divided thought? To think at all is divisive, analytic, manifold and the like. But it gets worse: how can intuition be wrested from the grip of history, personal and cultural, from memory as it seizes upon the present making it its own? Memory and anticipation own time and therefore, existence?

If this is the premise, then it seems hopeless, and 'nonpropositional knowledge" is impossible. But I don't think language, while manufacturing abstractions ("the presidency" say, is an abstraction; though the utterance, the thought, is an actuality) freely in a culture, constricts meaning's possibilities. I can, in other words, behold what is not language, yet is "in" a language that conceives what is beheld. Thinking only "corrupts" intuition when it is categorically insistent.

Wake up in the morning, and interpretation spontaneously seizes the day, so to speak. Not what Whitman had in mind, this "going along" into the regular affairs that carve out one's existence. What is being suggested here is that standing apart from this can restore something not simply at peace, but radically outside the Totality of what thought, as a cultural institution, can say.

I’m guessing that because intuitions are representations of observations, the rationale is that the innocence of being observed is lost to manifestation as phenomenon. While that does no harm, it also has no benefit. Seems like naught but a minor rendition of “non-overlapping magisteria”, in that observation is this, intuition is that and while one necessarily presupposes the other, neither is contained in the other. In other words, intuitions are never that which is observed, which in turn leaves observation to be just what it is, no part of it in the least undone. — Mww

Intuition as representations is entirely on the other side of the idea presented here. One has to drop this primacy of rationality as the way to understand the world. To think like this encourages the problem. Presupposition is part of a rational game of discursivity. Intuition is far and away NOT about this.

I think you’re trying to elaborate on the distinction between private philosophy (thought) and public philosophizing (thought-in-the-world), re:

It is called 'I am' in the context of language; it is complex in that when you look for the 'I am" you find a multiplicity, not a singularity. One finds thinking, feeling and the rest; but a single "I" does not show up.
— Astrophel

So it was called “I am” in the context of “I think”, as it should be. I am that which thinks, is a singularity. Even though “I” never shows up in thought, it is nonetheless the case that all thought is the manifestation of a singular thinker, for which “I” is merely the representation. All of THAT, in the context of language. — Mww

"I am" is not a singularity. there are no such things in language. To think at all is to be in the deployment of universals. this is what we seek to step beyond, yet of necessity, stay within: to engage a singularity is impossible. To engage an intuition that imparts novel meaning, and then to look to language and find that universality of reference is really a temporal imposition that tries to "claim" the intuition and assimilate it into a common idea, puts language in a dubious position. For one then has to reconcile language with what is NOT in the Totality of what is commonly held, and indeed, what is not language at all.
This is the issue here. It is that taking truth to be a matter of the understanding, and then relegating the understanding to rationality along with the combined reductive tendency of a culture, is the very essence of philosophical error. Originally, if you will, we are "of a piece" in affectivity, conceived broadly, and reason---that are, keeping in mind, only affectivity and reason because they are so named in an analytic process. But it is an impossible whole to conceive within the discursivity of a Totality, unless that Totality is committed to a form of gelassenheit (see above).

If you can elaborate this a little more I would like to hear it. Note: plain language would help if possible. — I like sushi

Plain language in an exotic philosophical setting. Exotic because this kind of thing is almost anathema in Anglo American philosophy, as I have read.

What is it to know? If there is no way to account for this, then we are lost. I mean, if language is only self referential, and one cannot grasp even in the imagination what, at the most basis level, of knowledge claims could even possibly be, then knowledge isexistentially without meaning. What do I mean by existentially? Reference is to existence, and existence refers to the palpable "sense" of being here, and this refers to not simply raw physical feels and impositions, but, thoughts, and affectivity (a broadly conceived affectivity that comprises our ethics and aesthetics). Do thoughts exist? Of course. Existence is not to be reduced to "metaphysical physics". Does affectivity exist? A foolish question, really: nothing could be more palpable.

I think language gets lost in language, and it is the familiarity of language that removes for our sight an original existence, not original in an historical sense, as if once long ago, but original as in something primordial and "under the skin" of what we call experience.
Easy to access, in a way, because while language creates an analytic divided world, it also puts it back to gether again; in other words, language is also redemptive when the direction of inquiry goes to basic questions: those words you're thinking now, from whence to they come? I am thinking of Beckett's book Molloy. the idea is how to get around the extraordinary claim that it is language that speaks! Not "me". Molloy/Molone is dying, but it is not the death of the body, but of language, and words that linger to the end, grasping for existence, knowing soon words will not sustain the monologue that is the self.

What does one make of such a thing? You see, language creates the drama of being alive; it IS this drama. It is argued here, by me, that this, well, staged event of being a person is a constructed imposition on existence, because Molloy's existence is clearly NOT the vacuity of language, of words qua words.

Sounds to me like a revelation is what you are looking for, but why think there is any relationship between intuitions and revelation? — wonderer1

Not so much looking for, as if set out to find one. But I do think the encounter with the world that is discovered is revelatory. It is a revelation to liberate one existence from the categorical illusions created by historical analyses. It is a revelation about what one intuits when intuition discovers the world that has been pushed out of sight by language and culture.

Sounds to me like a revelation is what you are looking for, but why think there is any relationship between intuitions and revelation? — wonderer1

Revelation: something revealed. Intuition: something intuited, and something intuited reveals that which is intuited, doesn't it? Nothing ambiguous here. And the question remains: what is it, exactly, that is intuited. My position is that we live in a world which has a secret, a metaphysical secret that is brought into existence by language: language divides the world and hypostatizes these divisions making the world seem categorically diverse and analytically complex. But its not.

There is "behind" our routine knowledge claims a foundation of intuited reality that can only be acknowledged if we suspend the the abstract processes of thought-in-the-world. The revelation follows a restoration of an original intuition lost in the drive to explain, solve problems, and so on.

It's not clear to me what you are arguing, or what you are arguing against. The idea of intellectual intuition is the idea that we can hsve purely rational intuitions of reality, or the nature of reality. Are you agreeing with that position or not? — Janus

I am taking the notion of intellectual intuition to task. Intellectualism gives undo privilege to cognition, and the term cognition, like all terms, is an artificial structure imposed on the world to talk about it, manage it, have discourse on it, and so on. But the original whole out of which this categorical thinking issues remains what it is. It is all of what we might say, and yet none of these: certainly logic is not about nothing, nor is affectivity; but concepts like these that quantify and divide experience, because they are categories, do not represent the original uncategorized primordial whole.
The idea here is to put at bay the knowledge claims that spontaneously spring into play when we experience the world. Such a suspension delivers the world from the imposition of abstraction that the primacy of the intellect has brought to philosophy. And affectivity is no longer pushed into irrelevance.

The question then is, what does affectivity "say" in the setting of being restored to its place?

Why would you want to? — wonderer1

Well, it is the point I am raising. Consider what a pure intuition would be. We are so used to absolutes belonging to the "certainty" of logic, and logic being a mere formal, content free dimension of judgment that could yield no real knowledge because it is simply empty. But an existential intuition? Both about existence AND apodictic!
Such a thing is a revelation.