Cool. As to my liking for Jung, yea, so so. Some of his concepts are interesting to me - and, maybe even pragmatic in certain contexts for some - but, notwithstanding, not analytical enough for my general tastes. Notions such as that of synchronicity and the universal unconscious come to mind. Well, this when considered from a panpsychistic perspective; or, at least, something close enough to it. As I said, interesting but in no way definitive. — javra

Yeah, he gets too far out for me also at times. But I really valued his concept of the shadow. Probably the best idea I got from him was : Whatever is unconscious is projected.

I connect this with the ferryman in Hesse's Siddhartha and 'nothing human is alien to me.' It also gels with the better part of Nietzsche. Resentment tends to be connected to self-righteousness which tends express an ignorance of the evil in one's own self. Roughly, the fucked up world is just a mirror of the contradictions in my own depths ---which can, fortunately, be relatively harmonized --perhaps by (among other things) integrating the shadow, which boils down to expanding the self-image toward the infinite, giving up on phony purity poses, etc.

Sense organs in situ are not objects in the world, unless you’re studying them as an optometrist, for example. They are fundamentally elements of experience - they’re referred to in Buddhism as ‘sense-gates’. — Wayfarer

Eyes, olfactory bulbs, the machinery of the ear -- in situ ( 'in the original position') are not objects of the world ? I don't have to be an optometrist to shake the water out of my ears when I go swimming, to worry that so-and-so overheard me gossiping.

Objects of experience, eh ? We do see the eyes of others, yes, by using our own eyes.

I'm truly surprised that you can't see the dependence of concepts like experience on our ordinary existence in the lifeworld with other people. You haven't addressed (maybe haven't grasped) the objection yet, that the sense organs are treated as both illusions and the source of illusions.

Maybe I'll check out Jung's analysis though, sounds quite worthwhile. — javra

If you like Jung already, you'll probably enjoy it. His ambivalence is fascinating. Mercy of a Rude Stream also gives an outside perspective on how shocking Ulysses was to its contemporaries. I suspect that most people forget or were never quite aware of how far Joyce went in that book. The 'Satanism' in Emerson is also seemingly forgotten. Fame obscures their continuing power, just as there's an 'idle talk' declawed sentimental version of that old corruptor of youth, who went walking along with his demon, asking embarrassing questions.

there are some who do maintain that the philosopher, as an individual subject (subjected to the very same world of objects and logic to which everyone else is an equal subject of), is strictly illusion — javra

My retort to them would be: please explain what illusion can even mean without a person in a world they can be wrong about.

And it doesn't strike me as the only mythos to which it could apply. — javra

:up:

You ever looked into Finnegans Wake ? It's a wild wheel that's built on archetypes. It's as if Joyce had studied so many plots that they all bled together. Language itself had to melt to capture the liquidity of symbolic reality. He wanted to share a timeless consciousness. Jung's essay on Joyce's Ulysses is also profound. Starts negative but gets more and more complimentary and insightful, as if he was grokking it as he griped.

We are forced up and out and engaged in this or that. All of this fuss. — schopenhauer1

We are forced to wake from the mud, but life is to some degree a choice. I've known suicides and half-suicides (junkies who overdosed.) I don't judge them. I don't think I'm better than them in some absolute sense. Our mortality threatens all such calculations. Does it matter that this boy got himself killed by messing around with the wrong girl or driving drunk ? Another plotline features him dying of ass cancer in Florida. It matters to a few other mortals while they last. Meaning is a function of the perishable flesh.

Taoism, seems to want one to sort of glide through the surface of the struggle rather than fight it. There is a Way and it flows like a river. But you see, that is tolerance of the struggle, not escape. Sleep is escape par excellence. The Way is tolerance (meditate whilst doing the dishes, sweep the floor in a fluid motion, etc.). Sleep is escape. — schopenhauer1

Yes, Taoism also uses the metaphor of the sweet old grandmother. So one glides through life with a tenderness for others. I work around women who clearly get much of their joy from nurturing (health field, boyfriends, children, pets.) That sweet unselfish love is indeed a nice way to slide through time.

I love sleep, personally. I haven't worked as hard as I could have in the world (haven't piled up coins) because I like to sleep in, daydream. But sleep is a popular metaphor for death, and sleeping through life is like a nonviolent substitute for death that maximizes Taoism's glide.

If there are universals among, at the very least, all human beings – to include identical aspects of our cognition as a species, the occurrence of other humans, and the reality of an objective world commonly shared by all – how might these universal truths be discerned or discovered without any investigation into what is in fact actual relative to the individual subject? — javra

To finally reply to this (though I think you and I have already come to agreement on it) [ so this might be redundant for those who have grasped the point already ] :

My approach can't talk the madman out of his madness. What I'm trying to do is find the assumptions (often tacit) that must have already been made in order to play the game of philosophy in the first place.

So I respond to the person who makes certain claims by pointing out that their claims are a performative contradiction. The person who doesn't believe in a world that encompasses us both and a language we can discuss it in is (if somehow sincere and actually thinkable) simply insane -- cannot even count as a philosopher. In short, the very concept of philosophy implies/assumes a encompassing-shard world-language that individuals can be wrong about (or more or less correct about, etc.)

In a way, it reminds me of the better aspects of Nietzsche. — javra

Yeah, Nietzsche's golden passages are transcendent and joyous and sweetly wicked.

Though I don’t have tremendous respect for the person who said it, I can jive with the aphorism, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.” — javra

In a similar way, I think there's a worthy insight wrapped up in Stirner's work. From Brandom I get the idea that the autonomy project is at the very heart of the Enlightenment. Lucifer is the light bringer. Socrates questions everything. Presuppositionless is the freedom of a god.

Roughly speaking, Stirner's points about the radically free ego are like Hegel's points about a community that's transcended its alienation. That alienation is the 'illusion' (necessary like training wheels, for awhile) that the species has to ethically account for itself to something outside it. To be sure, our environment constrains us practically, but that's a different issue. Stirner recaptures (reiterates in a new lingo) what was already in Romantics like Schlegel --the idea of an infinite irony, the transcendental buffoon. I suppose some of this is in DADA too. We'd probably agree that it feels bad to be cruel or petty. So the person aware of 'insane' freedom tends even to be nice. A sense of the infinite puts one in a good mood. I speculate that maybe even the Buddha saw such freedom but didn't bother talking much about 'the dark side of the force.'

As a person with math background you might ask this question of that discipline as well. Every day about 80 articles are submitted to ArXiv.org . There are probably tens of thousands of articles published that are read by less than five people and have not garnered enough support to move the needle of mathematical desire.

To this extent most mathematics and philosophy have little to no effect on the twists and turns of civilization. But there is a kind of satisfaction to the individual producing their product. — jgill

Yes indeed! I remember having complicated feelings as I realized that economically I was and am primarily a teacher of low-level math to students who are required to take this or that class for their degree. Turns out that I like what is largely a social role and seem to be pretty good at it, at least in certain scholastic contexts (small classrooms among students who are chasing a particular future job have been best, in my experience.)

At the moment I'm more invested in philosophical/literary creativity, but I have at times been obsessed with mathematical creativity (constructions of the real numbers, cryptosystems, etc.) For me it's more about creation than discovery, at least once I got a sufficient sense of the space. I was playing sculptor in a material stronger than steel. I really like (when in that mood) building cryptosystems with a focus on beauty and strangeness rather than on what the economy needs (contraptions with [ metaphorically speaking ] spinning wheels, clever clockwork.) But I haven't had much luck doing math with others.

FWIW, I think you are right to consider natural constraints on morality. It'd be weird to have large language-ready brains and not ethical systems centered on the cooperation of Us which is sometimes against Them. This (coincidentally?) mirrors the cooperation of the organs within our bodies. 'Inefficient' ethical systems would seemingly be filtered out in something like memetic evolution, while efficient ones would spread --- perhaps by conquest, but maybe just by trade, missionaries, etc.

.

Life by definition wants to live. There is no life otherwise and no discussion of anything. — Kaplan

As others have maybe said in their own way perhaps, this can be framed without the language of emotion in terms of genes being filtered out if they don't keep their moist robots breeding. Life is a stubbornly persistent pattern -- typically persisting through a creation-death loop allowing for constant tiny adjustments. We'd expect just this kind of pattern to predominate in the long run.

For sure. My second wife is a master of sociability. I emulate her as much as possible. It's an art but it can be learned. — Pantagruel

:up:

I should add for completeness that one could very much focus on an explicitly suicidal sage. We could create one as a character in a cosmic novel. His minimal belief is that nonexistence is always better. His ethics is spreading the word of the cure of suicide. He prints his manifesto like a friendly virus and swallows hemlock.

Who was the pessimist who hung himself by stepping off a stack of copies of his just-published suicidal opus ? There's a dark beauty in that.

When I was younger, I was occasionally gripped by intense depression -- to the point of almost continual suicidal ideation. I would go to bed at night and wake up in the morning thinking about offing myself (wrestling with it, trying to justify the harm I'd cause others, dwelling on the details of method, worrying about leaving a mess.) Part of the hell was I could not talk about it, because it was as if I was afflicted by the truth as a lethal virus. I had been bitten by a zombie and should jump into the nearest active volcano, that sort of thing. I'd look at the world through suicidal eyes for the few weeks this depression usually lasted. The whole world becomes a disgusting spectacle on a TV that one is seriously considering 'repairing' with a sledgehammer.

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

But even in suicidal despair, there's a part of the self (I claim) that enjoys the glory of transcendence. To call the world an idiot's babble is to speak from a place above it -- and above everybody in it. To eat a shotgun is to repeat the gesture of a god who once used water to the do the same thing. (We are limited to destroying our own nervous system, our own window in a world that stubbornly exceeds us.)

Recognising that the brain synthesises sensory inputs with pre-existing knowledge is not 'spatial reasoning', but comes from direct analysis of how cognitive processes and reason operate together. — Wayfarer

I don't mean anything fancy by spatial reasoning. I mean the most barbarically obvious common sense of brains being inside skulls, connected to the spinal cord. I mean realizing that the optic nerve runs from the eye to the brain. I mean looking at other human beings and seeing their sense organs and understanding that their awareness (reports of beliefs and feelings) is a function of (among other things) the spatial and temporal relationship between sense organs and events and objects in the world. Barbarically obvious common sense. Nothing fancier.

And let me stress that I'm not averse to challenging common sense. But one cannot, if one cares about developing a rational system of beliefs in the first place, simultaneously use commonsense to argue against that same common sense. The following is absurd : 'Sense organs are mere appearances (not real) because sense organs are so real that they create reality.'

It says something about us humans that we so easily tell ourselves such confused stories. We take a sensible awareness of the importance of the individual human nervous to ridiculous self-cancelling extremes. (Others pretend they can do without the world-encompassed nervous system in the opposite 'antispiritual' direction.)

It's very much a "You have to have been there." situation, but Meri handled this guy twice her size perfectly. To me then, it was like watching magic. — wonderer1

Excellent example. To me it seems that socialization is the supreme 'art.' The conceptual aspect of philosophical conversation would be only a tiny aspect of this. In you situation, the bodies involved play a huge rule. I think we agree that most of this skill is radically tacit. [ Heidegger (as you may know) is famous for emphasizing the centrality of this circumspective 'autopilot' understanding. 'Logocentrism' is a bit tainted by ambivalence toward Derrida, but before or beyond all of that (and Derrida personally -- though on the whole I like him) the critique of logocentrism seems completely respectable to me. Is there no 'knowledge' in Coltrane's music (or in a great painting or a work of architecture) ? Or (as Whitman might point out, picturing a lean man with sweat on his back) in the confident chopping of firewood ?

Buddha was "enlightened" but he did not simply cease to exist. He was free of all attachments, so some sort of "ego death". But what is that really? — schopenhauer1

Judging by What The Buddha Taught (Rahula),his life became about helping people free themselves from the greed and confusion that tends to capture human beings. I expect it was the joy an ideal parent takes in watching their child's personality develop.

In my opinion, ego death is also featured in Hegel and Feuerbach. To become a cultural being is to transcend the usual petty identifications and learn to take the impersonal personally. As I see it, Qoheleth and the Buddha both have therapeutic intentions. To me there's something like a sugared consumerist mystified version of the wise man and something even anti-Romantically earthy.

Jung wrote an essay on Joyce's Ulysses that starts out negative and critical but more and more gets to the realistically mystical essence of the book, bringing us basically to what Shakespeare symbolizes -- a god who watches without judgment, without identifying with the good guys or the bad guys but shining like a sun on all. The ferryman in Hesse's Siddhartha also represents this. As a biased person, I suggest that the usual sentimental version of the holy man is a consumer product, because it methodically excludes (for profit and popularity) the integration of the shadow (an awareness that the world is fucked up because it mirrors my own ambivalent depths.) This integration, dangerous and unpleasant, has been presented as a path that can lead to a harmonization of internal contradictions. In short, I don't see the Buddha as someone who hid from the evil in himself. He knew it so intimately that he could be bored with it. Everything is burning, him first.

It is to step back as far as possible by having a method that systematically abstracts such historical contingencies until only the pure structure of “being” is being contemplated. — apokrisis

I pretty much agree with this, but Shakespeare is celebrated largely because of his insight into human nature. Being (some would claim) always exist for and through a particular human personality. Many personalities are motivated to present their own conceptual map as superior to other, in terms of criteria like completeness, consistency, and relevance.

You could make a case that he spoke to the metabolism - the economic and political order - of his time. — apokrisis

Sure, and I think there are deconstruction-adjacent forms of literary criticism that dissolve the creative personality into a mere thermostat of their time -- ignoring that their own criticism becomes equally 'irrational' --a mere blinking light on the history machine -- thereby.

The psychoanalyst shrinks the head of the commie who does a reductive class analysis of that reductive headshrinker. Indra's net. Clashing personalities/ideologies tend to model, place, and reduce their rivals. My 'ism' is always the 'highest' according, naturally, to the very criterion it offers in the first place.

Your inner circle are your back-slapping chorus. Your outer ring becomes your treacherous rivals for the prize. Then beyond that, you are back into the general crowd of folk "doing science, but no threat to your career prospects" and hence its all friends again as you turn your collective hatred on the metaphysicians or the government funding agencies. — apokrisis

:up: .

Yes, precisely so. — javra

:up:

I think we agree on fallibilism.

There’s a lot to the link you’ve shared. Descartes was a man in search of infallible knowledge. I’m one to believe such cannot be had. — javra

Just to be clear, I didn't expect you to read all of that thread. I think many philosophers have tried to establish a safe base of operations, a relatively certain center from which to speculate.

My suggested 'core' (which I think is what Karl-Otto Apel was getting at) is what you seemed to accept also.

Communication that intends truth assumes (tacitly) a single world that encompasses all participants, and any relatively private subspaces (personal imaginations, maybe qualia) that might be allowed to them, as well as a set of shared semantic-logical norms. — plaque flag

To deny this leads to performative contradiction, so it's something like non-emprical knowledge (approximately analytic). As philosophers ( I claim) we can rule out self-contradiction right away. Personally I tend to also rule out fancy words that merely hide ignorance. The classic example is explaining the existence of the world, very complex already, with an even more complex god which itself is left unexplained. In other words, I vote for open-mindedness within the limits of telling a coherent story and recognizing and avoiding pseudo-explanations. I think we agree on an awareness of ignorance --on keeping the darkness visible.

Well that is my current research interest. To model life and mind at all their levels in organismic language. — apokrisis

Would you say though that this is very different than what Shakespeare was doing ? Of course Shakespeare is just an example. Pick your favorite 20 novelists.

I suggest that some kind of valuable knowledge is communicated in fiction, however indirectly or even ambiguously.

Granted that a person primarily wants to understand reality, what case can be made for the superiority of one path over another ?

Can either path really encompass the other, given human finitude ? Or is there a kind of blindness in each position to the richness of the other ?

Even this isn't a defense of the novelist, but an attempt to show that the existential aspect of reality 'ought' to be covered simply because it's there and plays a key role (not for sentimental reasons.)

Our positions are poles apart if I am emphasising the socially constructed and communal nature of rational inquiry, and you are pushing the Romantic image of the individual genius. — apokrisis

Just to be clear, I am not emphasizing the Romantic image of the genius. I don't think you are quite seeing where I'm coming from. I've been trying to find different aspects of it to bridge the gap.

This is only a very rough sketch of just one possible account regarding Kantian categories and the objective world. — javra

It occurs to me that any such sketch is aimed at describing the world. Your words are understood to be relevant to me. Communication that intends truth assumes (tacitly) a single world that encompasses all participants, and any relatively private subspaces (personal imaginations, maybe qualia) that might be allowed to them, as well as a set of shared semantic-logical norms. I see all this as a unified phenomenon.

More on this here:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/13308/our-minimal-epistemic-commitment-fixing-descartes-cogito/p1

“But although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience.” This is from the CPR. — Janus

I remember various appreciators of Kant stressing his realization of how actively the mind projects hypotheses. Isn't the updated version basically the denial of the blank slate ? Without the absurd denial of the reality of brain, thankfully.

Without prior experience to reflect upon (without memory in other words), how would we ever be able to discover such principles? — Janus

I think you nailed it. I project what I learn from the past into the future. So I know (or think I know) some things about events that haven't happened yet. The knowledge is prior to the experience of those events, not to experience in general.

I know (I have license to assert and expect) that any 3-sided polygons I stumble upon will have angles that sum to $\pi$ ( radian measure). But I know this because of the study of Euclid in the past.

I'm open to the possibility of an intricate tale that absorbs this piece of Kant and saves it from immediate self-cancellation. But this is an extremely low bar ! In the same way, maybe the God of Abraham did create the world, about 6000 years ago, and put in all kinds of misleading stuff like the 'wrong' amount of radioactive carbon, etc., for who knows what reason.

I'm trying to emphasize the huge gap between the distantly maybe possible (with lots of effort) and that which we can fairly confidently take for granted as we discuss more outlandish possibilities. Kant is offering something that's supposed to be foundational, but it's outlandish, and he doesn't even see the issue I addressed (at least I am not aware of him addressing it.)

Excellent quote. It touches on a related issue. I looked into all is vanity recently, and 'vanity' is a translation of the word 'hevel.' This word, which literally means something like 'vapor' or 'mist' is itself already a rich metaphor in the original text. Different scholars lean toward different dominant meanings as the best interpretation. To me it's beautiful that the metaphor is elusive, because I think hevel also suggests the ambiguity (blurryness, slipperiness) of human life.

Vapor, mist, fog. Life is a journey through fog. It's not just the unpredictability of many events and the limit of our sense organs (I can't see around the mountain.) In my opinion, humans don't and even can't have that strong of a grip on the meaning of the words they use. We are trained into stringing together the usual hieroglyphics (a metaphor for metaphoricity.) The hollowness or emptiness of our practical chatter is usually politely ignored. We worship machines that work. Science shines by reflected light. Give us this day our cellphone porn and opiates. It doesn't matter that we parrot the creeds of the day with minimal comprehension. Wave the blue flag or the red. Show up to work. Get the results. [ This isn't always unpleasant, just to be clear. ]

But calling it vapor and fog and emptiness creates a distance, transforms the passionate anguished submersion into a spectacle, a game, a view also above and not just from stage. Schopenhauer discusses the genius (surely a self-portrait) as hardly really there in the world, living mostly in a symbolic realm, finding Platonic structure (and therefore beauty!) is the otherwise empty spectacle --in the ambiguous vapor, blurry form without substance. No matter. (No matter as solid substance surviving the fire of time -- unless the fire of time itself be that 'substance' -- or we count the patterns that are destroyed and created again and again (a Finnegans Wake theme.) )

But even so, why does that make a difference – except in being a lossy compression of what I said? — apokrisis

I'm not sure the highest levels of personality (of symbolic life) can be adequately captured from the outside. What we are doing now is something like conversational research, which is maybe also a negotiation/invention of a common language (of semantic and logical norms.)

I think you defended philosophy above, so we are maybe on the same page here to some degree. 'Shakespeare' is a symbol for the symbolic sociality involved, which engulfs us as finite individuals, or perhaps ought to (we ought to seek out that danger/opportunity).

I'd say that sleep (including the sleep of death ) is fine, but this serene detachment is also a worthy goal. In my view, it's preferable to sleep/death --- while death is preferable to hopeless torment.

Funny you posted that right as I was responding. I was claimed by the real world all day.

Schopenhauer mentions how certain painters capture the expression of dispassionate knowledge. I've seen that in paintings and have always responded to it. One sees it in real people too, occasionally. Unlike most, who often seemed absorbed in their doings at the moment, a few seem wide eyed and calm, taking in the spectacle of life, detached from their current task, really noticing strangers. There's no tension in the face ('like a baby at a parade before it can smile.')

No. Neuroscience does that. The view of the neural level of world-making from a verbal and mathematical level of world-making. — apokrisis

Right, but I think of neuroscience as (roughly) software running on human hardware. Timebinding symbolic technique depends still on mortal brains, for now.

Interesting. There seems to be a similar performative contradiction in Donald Hoffman's idealist philosophy - if evolution is only about survival and does not support humans acquiring truth about reality, how does Hoffman ascertain that his metaphysics is true? I recall his response being something like - 'I don't, everything is wrong, even my theory.' Perhaps this is taking fallibilism too far. — Tom Storm

It's a bit like conspiracy theory. One seems to performs a daring skepticism but that skepticism is directed selectively indeed. At the base is a 'positive' attachment to a doctrine (equivalent to a persona) that fails to genuinely address the criticism of actual skeptics.

'The truth is there is no truth' is presented as the truth. 'There is a no world' is a presented as a fact about the world. The temptation is probably to push an awareness of individual bias to the extreme.

Is human philosophy 'constrained' to serve the particular groups of humans who cocreate it on some group level or some genetic level ? Is there a necessary philosophy ?

Is your own theory 'only' a tool evolved by and for humans ? Do humans have a purpose ? What if anything needs to be added to a Dawkins-like vision of moist robots?

One of the complexities here is that the human nervous system models in some sense the human nervous system.

What would Shakespeare have said? What would Peirce have said? From their points of view, what do you suspect would be the answer and why? — apokrisis

That'd be something like the Shakespearian approach to the question. I'd be articulating my models of two different personalities. For Shakespeare, the 'existential' plane is perhaps the worthiest focus, but he'd have to explore the other attitude to model Peirce -- have to end up undecided and undecidable. Cosmic irony.

We can use a word like “philosopher” widely or narrowly. But with that freedom comes the responsibility to not employ it confusingly and thus render our utterances vague. — apokrisis

A conception of philosophy looks to be an 'existential' (at base 'irrational') specification of the cognitive hero. A group forms around an implicit 'image' of this hero, the shadow or antipode of Hegel perhaps, and fits it in a robe of explicit principles -- a 'rationalization' of an identification that runs deeper than concept. But I can't experiment with such claims as if from a neutral vantage. This perspective is subject to its own corrosive analysis.

Kant was a genius, but his thinking shared in a serious problem common to the tradition of 'methodological solipsism' (Robert C. Solomon's term). By chance it was a line in Nietzsche that made the problem vivid for me.

... And others say even that the external world is the work of our organs? But then our body, as a part of this external world, would be the work of our organs! But then our organs themselves would be the work of our organs! — BGE

Whatever is given us as object, must be given us in intuition. All our intuition however takes place by means of the senses only; the understanding intuites nothing, but only reflects. [T]he senses never and in no manner enable us to know things in themselves, but only their appearances, which are mere representations of the sensibility, we conclude that 'all bodies, together with the space in which they are, must be considered nothing but mere representations in us, and exist nowhere but in our thoughts.' — Kant

The problem is of course that the sense organs are mere appearance and yet these merely apparent sense organs are the bedrock of the system.

Now,if I go farther, and for weighty reasons rank as mere appearances the remaining qualities of bodies also, which are called primary, such as extension, place, and in general space, with all that which belongs to it (impenetrability or materiality, space, etc.)—no one in the least can adduce the reason of its being inadmissible.[/b] As little as the man who admits colors not to be properties of the object in itself, but only as modifications of the sense of sight, should on that account be called an idealist, so little can my system be named idealistic, merely because I find that more, nay,

All the properties which constitute the intuition of a body belong merely to its appearance.

The existence of the thing that appears is thereby not destroyed, as in genuine idealism, but it is only shown, that we cannot possibly know it by the senses as it is in itself. — Kant

As far as I can make out, the vision at the base of this reasoning is of a brain, locked in the cave of the skull, constructing the world from inputs to the sense organs and concepts. But this is of course (at least) spatial reasoning. Where could ideas of the brain and its sense organs come from in the first place if not from their untrustworthy 'mere appearance' in (merely apparent) space and time ?

In ordinary life, we see people seeing. We model what they know by their spatial position relative to an event, etc. In short, common-sense time-and-space everyday experience of the bodily role in knowledge is unwittingly appealed to and used as the foundation for a system which calls this role, its own foundation, unreal -- mere appearance.

https://gutenberg.org/files/4363/4363-h/4363-h.htm
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/52821/52821-h/52821-h.htm

I think it's more likely that it is the understanding that is fragmentary. — Wayfarer

If we are just rudely blurting out opinions, then I think you aren't very good at distinguishing flowery rhetoric and a host of noobdazzling fallacies from an actual argument.

Just watched the series The Man in the High Castle (haven't read the book). I thought it was pretty good. — Janus

I also thought it was pretty good. I especially liked the performance of Rufus Sewell.

If that magisterial view of rational inquiry seems a bit sweeping, well it works. So believe it until a better method comes along. — apokrisis

Just to be clear, I don't mind sweeping. Is Shakespeare a better philosopher than Peirce ? Why or why not ? Different forms of sweepingness. I like grand theories.