absent an observer, whatever exists is unintelligible and meaningless as a matter of fact and principle. — Wayfarer

So do we agree that the cup, unobserved in the cupboard, still has a handle? I'm going to take it that we do, that the cup in the cupboard is not the sort of thing that you are talking about as "absent an observer". — Banno

I get what Wayf is trying to say here, but there 'is' not a [metaphysical] subject except as a perspectival form of being. Husserl's discussion of spatial objects is helpful here. What we tend to mean by a cup is that familiar object viewed perspectively through human eyes. I can never see all of it at once. I can see it from this place or that, in this lighting or that. Our embodied experience has always been and seeming must always continue to be 'perspectival.'

We don't know what we could even mean by the cup 'apart from human cognition'. Or rather such a statement is paradoxical, aimed of course precisely at the same human cognition which is supposed to contemplate the mystically Real cup its own absence.

The 'objective' cup is something like the cup from a (virtual, postulated) 'average' human perspective.

In my paper translation, estrangement is detachment.

Bhikkhus, when a noble follower who has heard (the truth) sees thus, he finds estrangement in the eye, finds estrangement in forms, finds estrangement in eye-consciousness, finds estrangement in eye-contact, and whatever is felt as pleasant or painful or neither-painful-nor-pleasant that arises with eye-contact for its indispensable condition, in that too he finds estrangement.

He finds estrangement in the ear... in sounds...

He finds estrangement in the nose... in odors...

He finds estrangement in the tongue... in flavors...

He finds estrangement in the body... in tangibles...

He finds estrangement in the mind, finds estrangement in ideas, finds estrangement in mind-consciousness, finds estrangement in mind-contact, and whatever is felt as pleasant or painful or neither-painful-nor-pleasant that arises with mind-contact for its indispensable condition, in that too he finds estrangement.

When he finds estrangement, passion fades out. With the fading of passion, he is liberated.When liberated, there is knowledge that he is liberated. He understands: 'Birth is exhausted, the holy life has been lived out, what can be done is done, of this there is no more beyond.'

https://accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn35/sn35.028.nymo.html

In other words, the withdrawal of libido into internal images and concepts, away from transitory humiliating worldly things. I must be my own refuge, control my unruly mind, reel in my greedy tentacles. The world becomes a spectacle that doesn't tempt me.

The world is a wheel, and the world is a fire. The world is a Firewheel.

Bhikkhus, all is burning. And what is the all that is burning?
...
The eye is burning, forms are burning, eye-consciousness is burning, eye-contact is burning, also whatever is felt as pleasant or painful or neither-painful-nor-pleasant that arises with eye-contact for its indispensable condition, that too is burning.

Burning with what? Burning with the fire of lust, with the fire of hate, with the fire of delusion. I say it is burning with birth, aging and death, with sorrows, with lamentations, with pains, with griefs, with despairs.
...
The mind is burning, ideas are burning, mind-consciousness is burning, mind-contact is burning, also whatever is felt as pleasant or painful or neither-painful-nor-pleasant that arises with mind-contact for its indispensable condition, that too is burning.

Burning with what? Burning with the fire of lust, with the fire of hate, with the fire of delusion. I say it is burning with birth, aging and death, with sorrows, with lamentations, with pains, with griefs, with despairs
...

https://accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn35/sn35.028.nymo.html

How much does Schop add ? Stuff on music and art ? How much does Kant help ?

Some more good stuff that seems relevant:

Let us suppose a subject without any point of view on the world – such a subject would have access to the world as a totality, without anything escaping from its instantaneous inspection of objective reality. ... it would no longer be possible to ascribe sensible receptivity and its spatio-temporal form – one of the two sources of knowledge for Kant, along with the understanding – to such a subject, which would therefore be capable of totalizing the real infinity of whatever is contained in each of these forms. By the same token, since it would no longer be bound to knowledge by perceptual adumbration, and since the world for it would no longer be a horizon but rather an exhaustively known object, such a subject could no longer be conceived as a transcendental subject of the Husserlian type. But how do notions such as finitude, receptivity, horizon, regulative Idea of knowledge, arise? They arise because, as we said above, the transcendental subject is posited as a point of view on the world, and hence as taking place at the heart of the world.

The subject is transcendental only insofar as it is positioned in the world, of which it can only ever discover a finite aspect, and which it can never recollect in its totality. But if the transcendental subject is localized among the finite objects of its world in this way, this means that it remains indissociable from its incarnation in a body; in other words, it is indissociable from a determinate object in the world. Granted, the transcendental is the condition for knowledge of bodies, but it is necessary to add that the body is also the condition for the taking place of the transcendental. That the transcendental subject has this or that body is an empirical matter, but that it has a body is a non-empirical condition of its taking place – the body, one could say, is the ‘retro-transcendental’ condition for the subject of knowledge.
....
To think ancestrality is to think a world without thought – a world without the givenness of the world. It is therefore incumbent upon us to break with the ontological requisite of the moderns, according to which to be is to be a correlate. Our task, by way of contrast, consists in trying to understand how thought is able to access the uncorrelated, which is to say, a world capable of subsisting without being given. But to say this is just to say that we must grasp how thought is able to access an absolute, i.e. a being whose severance (the original meaning of absolutus) and whose separateness from thought is such that it presents itself to us as non-relative to us, and hence as capable of existing whether we exist or not. But this entails a rather remarkable consequence: to think ancestrality requires that we take up once more the thought of the absolute; yet through ancestrality, it is the discourse of empirical science as such that we are attempting to understand and to legitimate.

Can he go backwards, take a new path around embarrassing subjectivity ? Is the quest for the pure dead object beyond description, free from anthropocentric taint, a perverse theological quest ? The Real is always out of reach. To me it seems that Kant might even have had ancestral statements in mind. They even tempt me to posit some vast black precognitive voidstuff. But I refuse to pretend I can give such a phrase meaning. If there's a glitch in the Matrix, so be it.

Damn, bringing in the speculative realists!
:clap: — schopenhauer1

I don't agree with M, but I like that he sees the fucking issue. His weird attempt to wriggle out of correlationism is fascinating, and he sees his foe better than those who might be its ally if they understood it. My thread here is an outright variant of correlationism. As is any perspectivism that understands consciousness as the being of the world itself, through or for that perspective.

provided it is not presumed to say what the nature of a perspectiveless existence could be.

I don't doubt that some things make sense to some and not to others, which means that this issue is probably not susceptible to rational argument at all. — Janus

So we arrive at the mighty mystical X yet again ? It's fine to posit X as long as we admit (and don't even care) that we don't know what we are talking about ? Why not not posit it ? I'd rather just call paradox or confusion what it is. Why bluff ?

I'll put this quote here too in order to rep correlationism.

...it would be naïve to think of the subject and the object as two separately subsisting entities whose relation is only subsequently added to them. On the contrary, the relation is in some sense primary: the world is only world insofar as it appears to me as world, and the self is only self insofar as it is face to face with the world, that for whom the world discloses itself

the metaphysician who upholds the eternal-correlate can point to the existence of an ‘ancestral witness’, an attentive God, who turns every event into a phenomenon, something that is ‘given-to’, whether this event be the accretion of the earth or even the origin of the universe. But correlationism is not a metaphysics: it does not hypostatize the correlation; rather, it invokes the correlation to curb every hypostatization, every substantialization of an object of knowledge which would turn the latter into a being existing in and of itself. To say that we cannot extricate ourselves from the horizon of correlation is not to say that the correlation could exist by itself, independently of its incarnation in individuals. We do not know of any correlation that would be given elsewhere than in human beings, and we cannot get out of our own skins to discover whether it might be possible for such a disincarnation of the correlation to be true.

The meaning of ancestral statements is supposed to be a problem for correlationism, but it's also an argument for correlationism. I don't remember M seeing that. But I read a good amount of his other stuff, and he has some wild beliefs about the resurrection of the dead --that it could happen in the flesh. So his anti-religion pose is complex.

...our Cartesian physicist will maintain that those statements about the accretion of the earth which can be mathematically formulated designate actual properties of the event in question (such as its date, its duration, its extension), even when there was no observer present to experience it directly. In doing so, our physicist is defending a Cartesian thesis about matter, but not, it is important to note, a Pythagorean one: the claim is not that the being of accretion is inherently mathematical – that the numbers or equations deployed in the ancestral statements exist in themselves. For it would then be necessary to say that accretion is a reality every bit as ideal as that of number or of an equation. Generally speaking, statements are ideal insofar as their reality is one of signification. But their referents, for their part, are not necessarily ideal (the cat is on the mat is real, even though the statement ‘the cat is on the mat’ is ideal). In this particular instance, it would be necessary to specify: the referents of the statements about dates, volumes, etc., existed 4.56 billion years ago as described by these statements – but not these statements themselves, which are contemporaneous with us...
...
our Cartesian physicist will maintain that those statements about the accretion of the earth which can be mathematically formulated designate actual properties of the event in question (such as its date, its duration, its extension), even when there was no observer present to experience it directly. In doing so, our physicist is defending a Cartesian thesis about matter, but not, it is important to note, a Pythagorean one: the claim is not that the being of accretion is inherently mathematical – that the numbers or equations deployed in the ancestral statements exist in themselves. For it would then be necessary to say that accretion is a reality every bit as ideal as that of number or of an equation. Generally speaking, statements are ideal insofar as their reality is one of signification. But their referents, for their part, are not necessarily ideal (the cat is on the mat is real, even though the statement ‘the cat is on the mat’ is ideal). In this particular instance, it would be necessary to specify: the referents of the statements about dates, volumes, etc., existed 4.56 billion years ago as described by these statements – but not these statements themselves, which are contemporaneous with us

text
The physicist here is at least shrewd enough to put math on the side of appearance (for a human subject) but thinks some kind of pure 'matter' (matter-in-itself) makes sense anyway. To me ancestral statements are truly weird, possibly undecidable. But I'd rather call them out as semantically problematic than to show what a good little science boy I am and ignore the issue.

For context, I'm an atheist. No afterlife. No ghosts. I lean toward the tapwater 'miracles' of the mundane. So the usual psychologizing sophistry should be modified as you frame your retort. (Just kidding.)

It's simply the idea that the cosmos existed before humans. I don't understand what you think is problematic about the idea. — Janus

This may help. From a famous book on this issue:

...it would be naïve to think of the subject and the object as two separately subsisting entities whose relation is only subsequently added to them. On the contrary, the relation is in some sense primary: the world is only world insofar as it appears to me as world, and the self is only self insofar as it is face to face with the world, that for whom the world discloses itself...

...the metaphysician who upholds the eternal-correlate can point to the existence of an ‘ancestral witness’, an attentive God, who turns every event into a phenomenon, something that is ‘given-to’, whether this event be the accretion of the earth or even the origin of the universe. But correlationism is not a metaphysics: it does not hypostatize the correlation; rather, it invokes the correlation to curb every hypostatization, every substantialization of an object of knowledge which would turn the latter into a being existing in and of itself. To say that we cannot extricate ourselves from the horizon of correlation is not to say that the correlation could exist by itself, independently of its incarnation in individuals. We do not know of any correlation that would be given elsewhere than in human beings, and we cannot get out of our own skins to discover whether it might be possible for such a disincarnation of the correlation to be true. Consequently, the hypothesis of the ancestral witness is illegitimate from the viewpoint of a strict correlationism. Thus the question we raised can be reformulated as follows: once one has situated oneself in the midst of the correlation, while refusing its hypostatization, how is one to interpret an ancestral statement?
...
...our Cartesian physicist will maintain that those statements about the accretion of the earth which can be mathematically formulated designate actual properties of the event in question (such as its date, its duration, its extension), even when there was no observer present to experience it directly. In doing so, our physicist is defending a Cartesian thesis about matter, but not, it is important to note, a Pythagorean one: the claim is not that the being of accretion is inherently mathematical – that the numbers or equations deployed in the ancestral statements exist in themselves. For it would then be necessary to say that accretion is a reality every bit as ideal as that of number or of an equation. Generally speaking, statements are ideal insofar as their reality is one of signification. But their referents, for their part, are not necessarily ideal (the cat is on the mat is real, even though the statement ‘the cat is on the mat’ is ideal). In this particular instance, it would be necessary to specify: the referents of the statements about dates, volumes, etc., existed 4.56 billion years ago as described by these statements – but not these statements themselves, which are contemporaneous with us... — After Finitude

https://altexploit.files.wordpress.com/2017/06/quentin-meillassoux-ray-brassier-alain-badiou-after-finitude-_-an-essay-on-the-necessity-of-contingency-bloomsbury-academic_continuum-2009.pdf

I think a simpler example is that, in the US, we drive on the right. This norm is physically manifested everywhere.

The latest stochastic parrots find word-order norms in the internet. Such norms are so prevalent and readable that we can hardly tell these parrots from human beings.

I challenge the disconnected entity from a holist position as semantically ungrounded.

I see none of those in the idea that the world (universe, cosmos) exists independently of us, although it should be clear that by "world" I obviously don't mean "the (human) life-world". — Janus

The question is what do or can you mean ?

I don't see the idea of the world existing independently of humans — Janus

I think ancestral objects are a challenge to my view, but when one tries to imagine a meaning for the world existing independently of humans, one has only the raw material of experience. So one projects a fantasy, forgetting the living human being doing such projecting/imagining.

Just to be clear, the 'problem' is not so obvious as with the round square. But consider the spatial object, which is always seen perspectively. How else could it be seen ? That analogy carries over pretty well I think into this larger issue. We don't know what we are talking about. You can say you have a clear idea, and I can doubt it. And you can doubt my doubt. And so on. And that would be a kind of jam in the conversation.

But if you can make sense of the world existing independently of humans, I politely challenge you to share that sense here.

We are morally responsible for our actions, (although then only insofar as they will impact others) but we don't have to answer to anyone for our thoughts. I can tell you what i think without any expectation or concern that I am going to convince you to think as I do. — Janus

I say look at normative rationality at the heart of science and philosophy, the expectation that one justifies ones claims. Or look at a cheating boyfriend making excuses, or a job applicant making a case for a company's interest in hiring her. Or marriage vows. Or promising to take out the trash, walk the dog. Timestructure. Promises, explanations, justification of claims...

Do you think that the fact that world-from-no-perspective makes no sense to you entails that the world cannot exist without relying on any perspective? — Janus

I've believe that: all we ever have is beliefs. Such beliefs are the intelligible structure of the world as it is given to us (from our perspectives.) So this is how I currently experience the world, as given perspectively to myself and others.

I can't believe what I can't make sense of. I believe in 'round squares' as an kind of oxymoron or bad check. It exists in that sense, but I don't otherwise take round squares seriously. They just turn out to have a use as an example of the ability of humans to confuse themselves with sexy paradoxical phrases.

You are basically asking me if my not being able to make sense of the square root of blue means that there is no square root of blue. There's no great answer here. Nonsense does not compute.

But I really don't mind if people believe in things that seem like nonsense to me. I've been a skeptical atheistic fucker for a long time. It's just that here we should finally get to be honest on at least a few issues...as if we all agreed at the door to get our dearest beliefs and favorite phrases taken unseriously by others, so that we ourselves could enjoy the same privilege of not humoring those who make no sense to us.

Elementary particles, moments in time, genes, the brain – all these things are assumed to be fundamentally real. By contrast, experience, awareness and consciousness are taken to be secondary. — Quixodian

I think some people do indeed hold this to-me-problematic position. As a holist, I say it's just confusion to think concepts/entities have meaning independently. Everything is grounded in the community's lifeworld. If there's anything that can't rationally be doubted, it's this enworlded embodied community that strives to be rational. This framework gives scientific entities their sense in the first place. So they can't be fundamental except as legos in a game that tries to build the world from them ---without seemingly being able to touch the problem of being which is presuppose throughout.

And it's not always easy to find anyone who gives a shit about this stuff in the first place. So it's a huge luxury or privilege if you just happen to have a boatload of educated peers available to discuss the finer points of Heidegger or Popper with. That's probably why I find this forum so addictive. It's such a relief to find others for whom philosophy actually exists in a significant way.

But Schopenhauer's style of philosophy is far more compatible with these kinds of ideas than is stodgy realism. — Quixodian

I expect that a crude realism will always dominate the lives of the practical primate. Most people get their fix from visceral metaphors for being as a whole. They aren't as sensitive to rational norms, aren't annoyed by holes in the plot of a story that does, after all, get them through the stormy night.

I also think there are probably many, likely a good majority, of people who have no interest in thinking about these kinds of questions, so we are really only talking about people who are, at least in some sense, philosophically minded. — Janus

:up:

There's also that fabulous 1990's movie, The Game, Michael Douglas, in which the protagonist is caught up by an EST-type organisation. — Quixodian

:up:

Great flick.

It suggests they play to our sense that we - including scientists - don't really know what is real any more, that the whole of existence could be a simulation, fantasy or dream. — Quixodian

:up:

The world is mediated for us by screens. Maybe it used to be rumors brought by travelers, but at least then it was words which were clearly just words. Now we are moving toward screens that can lie to our eyes convincingly. These screens are even able to learn to lie better and better, because we've taught computers to program themselves --- to learn from examples and nothing else. We can't even understand the logic hidden in a billion parameters trained with enough electricity to run a small town for a week.

.

Reading is a form of dialogue. — Quixodian

:up:

Me and the author. Me and me. The author and the author. The self is a chaos of voices.

But I do think there is indeed a blind spot in some thinkers. It's a macho thing. Toughminded tech-oriented I'm-a-truth-computer thing. Only sissies notice personality.

How many people do you think have really taken on board Kant's 'copernican revolution in philosophy'? — Quixodian

The richest man in the world suggested that we live in a simulation. The Matrix was huge. Continental philosophy is mostly post-Kantian far as I can tell. Braver's A Thing of This World makes him, Kant, the official father of a rich tradition that takes the entanglement of subject and object for granted. After Finitude understands itself as a rebellion against this clearly dominant and oppressive 'correlationism,' that cuts us off from being cut off from the Real.

I'm really much more interested in the bubble issue itself, as I said above. Kant is just a symbol for that. But so is Hume. Methodological solipsism was always trying to say something profound. So I haven't abandoned what's good in it. I just believe in progress.

This is the advantage of abstract position terminology like direct realism. None of our sentimental attachments (which we all have) get involved in the same way.

Yeah that's fair. I've let go of the desire to say what he really meant, but obviously it can kick up now and again. — Moliere

I think it's great to steelman a beloved thinker. That's roughly equivalent to sharing what one thinks are good beliefs for possible adoption.

If you believe there's a heirarchy to texts, however, then the CPR will "trump" the prolegomena. That's why I quoted it in opposition to your prolegomena quote. — Moliere

I don't think there is a 'final' or 'authorative' perspective on Kant. He himself is a like a 'transcendent' spatial object, seen differently by all of us. No 'pure' or trans-perpsectival access.

I accept no authority whatsoever except good ol' rationality itself, an ideal on the horizon. So it's not a scriptural issue but more about whether we are in a bubble. Much bigger than Kant is the bubble issue itself.

Note that he inherited the trope. This is Hume.

We may observe, that 'tis universally allow'd by philosophers, and is besides pretty obvious of itself, that nothing is ever really present with the mind but its perceptions or impressions and ideas, and that external objects become known to us only by those perceptions they occasion.

So the notion that he's an empirical realist isn't just a kind of defense -- he's a Transcendental Idealist, which means the empirical world is fully real. — Moliere

But that contradicts what I've already quoted. I do think that his living intention is closer to what you say. It had to be. But he wrote some wild sci-stuff that, were he not the great famous philosopher, who lots of brilliant related stuff, would be mocked as post-DMT babble.

Heh, not at all. You're among friends here who like to be grouchy! :D — Moliere

Great to hear !

That is -- it's not the sense organs, which are a subject matter for empirical psychology, but sensibility, which is a part of our mind described at a very abstract philosophical level which founds knowledge on cognition. — Moliere

Oh I understand that. My point is that my ability to understand that (and Kant's) is parasitic on my everyday knowledge of sense organs in relation to objects --hence 'sensibility.' Semantic smuggling. It's sci-fi. Like the human idea of God, a daddy without a body. The whole notion of a single unified mind (a monologue in the bubble of experience) is likewise parasitic on our normative discursive participation in a community that trains us to be responsible as a 'free' body (or really the virtuality that haunts it) for that body's sayings and doings. One is one around here.

I like the term "deathfuck wheel". — schopenhauer1

:up:

Somewhere in our ancestral past, the human animal took itself out of time and out of the moment and into a virtualized world that is secondary. — schopenhauer1

:up:
Felix culpa ! Our glory and our fall. Finnegans Wake is between laughter and tears.

Thus the Fall into Time and the Exile from Eden. But not to romanticize any of it. — schopenhauer1

:up:
We need myths to put on the wound. Like those. Our metaphorical grasp of being as a whole is no small thing. I still love all is hebel. All is mist, vapor, vanity, a passing show. I too claim to have seen the greasy sinwheel, which spins without my affirmation and despite my denial. My personal reaction was accounted for in the days before creation. Or might as well have been.
*****

Hopefully you saw my larger point that all most the Kantian bullshit influence in Schopenhauer is disposable cardboard applicator. Images do the work for monkeys who think analogicallly.

:up:
I like the mix of reading and writing. I might add that it's great to read writers that attack one another.

Truth is reality. Reality is what exists regardless of what we believe. — Philosophim

How do you know when you are looking at it ?

And a belief is merely a name for a kind of articulated feeling. I feel this sort of way and when I express myself about it this is my belief. I believe this because I feel believe-y about it. It is the same with certainty and knowledge, which are all biological acts of one sort or another, vaguely described. — NOS4A2

If it's articulated, it's not just a feeling. If the world is given perspectively, then my beliefs about the world just are the world, for me. I think this claim might be offensive because we are so used to experiencing ourselves as 'we the sane people' who see obvious truths directly and don't therefore merely believe them. But I'm using belief as the meaningstructure of a world given perspectively. I'll readily grant that the world is given in a massive fullness of sensuality and feeling and meaningstructure, so that this meaningstructure, which we can put into words, is related to a kind of trust or feeling.

I'd say also that the world is given in modal intensities. We live in a field of possibility, with relatively solid actuality at its center. Actuality is what we are most certain about, the least blurry part of the world, the most well lit and stable.

I find your approach interesting. I remember someone saying something like truth is subjectivity we share together. I guess that expresses the notion of the often maligned intersubjectivity. — Tom Storm

To me it was a huge clarification to move from thinking of consciousness as a private dream-stuff to thinking of consciousness as a view on the world.

Consciousness is just the being of the world which is only given perspectively -- so far as I [can ] know --and I can't make sense of the 'round square' alternatives.

But why isn't it just private dreams ? Seems to me that rational discussion presupposes a shared world, or what are we talking about ?

Like many, I don't think we can ever arrive at an Archimedean point - a value free, prefect position of revealed reality. — Tom Storm

:up:

That tapwater fact that reality is given perspectively seems to imply this. What can we even mean by 'seeing around all perspectives' to get reality 'pure' ? It's like seeing a spatial object from no perspective at all, absurd.

How do you classify various types of truth claim? I guess truth is an abstraction and isn't a property which looks identical wherever it is said to exist. To say Jesus is the truth is one thing. To say technology via science provides working mobile phones is quite another type of claim. — Tom Storm

In my opinion, the cleanest way (ignoring secondary uses) is to think of 'P is true' as equivalent to the assertion of 'P.' Truth mostly gets mystified by those who forget our tapwater mundane perspectival situation. Their beliefs are true of course. And they speak to others in their agreeable peergroup about their 'truths' rather than their beliefs. We hold these truths to be selfevident. Mystification for a good cause. Sounds better than We hold these beliefs to require no justication.

More and more I think I'm just fixating on "foundations" as a word for its connotations more than denotations, given everything you've said to qualify the word. — Moliere

:up:

To me it's a bunch of metaphors, some of which have hardened into literality. Bottom, up, first, last, before, after. Embodied metaphoricity (Lakoff).

The former, so I believe, is a falsehood. But it's important to highlight some differences in interpreting and translating Kant -- for some interpretations he's a representationalist, and for some he's a presentationalist. In both, however, there's certainly only one empirical world. So even for Kant, with the distinction between phenomena/noumena, we start together in a single world (and end up together in a single mind). — Moliere

To me it's fairly obvious that Kant must have expected to be interpreted in a 'sane' way. So my own suggestion that the species is the real transcendental ego is an attempt to clean Kant up. But others got there before me, so I'm just catching up with the conversation.

So my issue is whether you can defend these claims with the texts. I don't blame you if you aren't in the mood to dig thru the texts. No problem. But I did quote clear passages and explain problems with them, and so far not a single Kantian on this forum has actually addressed them. The sense organs are used as real to argue that they (and everything else) is mere appearance ---radically unlike the real they merely represent, radically undermining methodological skepticism.

I really hope I don't sound grouchy. I just get into the spirit of the game.

Is the world given at all? — Moliere

I see from the emojis that you are joking. But as a serious question, I'd call it incoherent. It's self-defeating madness to call the obvious and given unreal in the name of a reality which is (by definition) nowhere to be found. Kant is both a cure for nonsense and its inspiration, depending on which side of the coin one looks.

t seems to me that ontology is always begging the question, which is why "the given" is tempting: there's a part of the world that's not conceptual, that's not derived from a logical structure. — Moliere

Note that I agree with this ontological claim. Only a few wacky philosophers forget that concept is merely one 'aspect' of the world. But I don't see any begging of the question.

I can only surmise that you insist on understanding ontology and rationality as I intend them as something weird or intricate or hidden ? For me phenomenology goes down and into the mundane. A person's ontology is just their big picture understanding of life/world/existence and understanding itself. Holism is the essence here. People study all kinds of things, specializing in this or that. But there's a mode of thinking which tries to synthesize a general understanding of reality, probably always with an emphasis on the role provided for this person to whom the world is given.

Heh, it seems so small to me. It's like removing saran wrap that you put around your face: what on earth was that saran wrap for? — Moliere

:up:
Hence 'the worldly foolishness of philosophy' and the 'sophistry' of non-understood gear for a primate who needs bread more than a intensified (luxurious, esoterically elaborated) coherence of identity. We don't need the difficult strong poet either, and really such a strong poet was never for everyone. We need the engineer who need not know or even care what his terms mean beyond marketable functionality. Pragmatism is a tempting vulgar flight from serious inquiry, and I say this as someone who learned much from Rorty and once found this flight more sophisticated than I currently do.

We might also talk of the accidental elitism of higher math with obvious application (advanced set theory) and the 'technical' 'niceties' of ontology embraced as a serious discipline. Maybe it's better to wail on the saxophone or do astrology charts, but I like this game, where the choice of a founding metaphor is indeed significant. 'Existentially' (to me) it's all hebel/hevel (vapor, mist, vanity). But it's a good way for dust that woke up to spend its little moment, seems to me.