Our basic sense of who we are has a top-down effect on the details, the 'trees.' If my hero is the scientist who gazes at the cold hard truth without bias, then I will reach for methods that make that possible. My whole grasp of what philosophy is will be in terms of gazing at cold hard truth heroically, while all the sissies gaze at their navels.

Or if I am fundamentally a believer in some God, then everything will be framed in those terms.

Or if I am fundamentally an irritable contrarian, then I will always look for a way to break out of dichotomies and be alone on some mountain above the battlefield, transcendent.

Does that make you a subjectivist too? — Posty McPostface

But what is a subjectivist out of context? See all of these little positions, these 'mini-identities,' are just like atomic words. I am suspicious about all the tidy categories. The big context is the entire personality, which I can only reveal through conversation (such as in this response.)

Yes, "justice" is an abstraction. What more can I say? — Posty McPostface

Well, you said the atomic meaning was apparent, and I was just trying to get you to introspect and see that words out of context don't have much force. Meaning is distributed. As you read this, your mind flows along the sentence and through time putting the words together in a mysterious complex thought. While the words have spaces between them and something vaguely like atomic meaning, they do not snap together that legos. The spatial metaphor is misleading.

Time is essential to meaning and therefore to being. Being is 'in' time, we might say.

Justice is an abstraction of the mind. Sure, we can disagree about it; but, the atomic meaning is apparent when we want to communicate it to another. — Posty McPostface

Is that so? So what lights up in your mind when I just offer the word 'justice' out of context?

My point is that words function together. Meanings do not snap together like legos. Of course there is something 'like' atomic meaning. A word has a kind of 'zone' of meaning even out of context. But this is the word in its weakest form. So I'd say we build a bad foundation when we take words at their weakest and vaguest and least alive and try to build from them (the bottom up approach.)

People unnecessarily make trouble for themselves. — Michael Ossipoff

Right, but they experience that making of unnecessary trouble as necessary at the time.

So, hence, words have atomic meaning. — Posty McPostface

What is the atomic meaning of 'justice'? Is it crisp in your head? Can you hold the exhaustive concept of justice in a single thought?

I'm surprised that you leap on these atomic meanings, given your love of Wittgenstein. IMO, there's a good reason that his views changed later.

How so? We all stand on the same ground more or less. — Posty McPostface

Exactly. We all stand on the same ground more or less, else we would not be able to make sense of one another at all. Now we are getting there. There is a basic intelligibility, a basic know-how, that we don't have to work for.

And this is where we really start, not from nothing. And where we go from here uses this mysterious basic intelligibility.

Your way of speaking and being manifests these 'truths' constantly. It's only when we reach for little machine like arguments that things get slippery, because then we try to do math with individual essences, ignoring the very framework that supports this attempt.

What is the ground without bedrock beliefs and truths? — Posty McPostface

My point is that the ground is somewhat obscure. Do you have any real doubt that you live in a world with others?

I'm saying that the ground is not a few ultra-important meanings but the language as a whole.

Understood. Yet, those atomic relations stand out from the rest. They are what ground meaning. — Posty McPostface

You just described exactly the view that I am 'attacking.'

Oy--we're probably complete opposites on that. I'm a subjectivist on meaning. Meaning is something that happens in individual's heads. And each individual will necessarily have non-identical meanings compared to other individuals ("strictly" non-identical, since nominalism is the case; they can be similar, but they won't literally be the same meaning). — Terrapin Station

I can somewhat to relate to that, but I wonder if you see where I'm coming from in terms of the interdependence of meanings --that they aren't really atomic.

Another approach is to just think about what it means to know English. Now you are not at all aware of every English word just now or every meaningful combination of words. But you have this know-how. The words pour out of you, their supposedly atomic meanings deeply interwoven through time. IMO, there's no way you can ever get behind this massive know-how to justify it or ground it. It is a 'groundless ground.' (Lee Braver's term.)

What is "meaning holism"? — Posty McPostface

I've written about it in lots of post, and the name 'macrosoft' even hints at it. Basically the idea is that the tree gets its meaning from the forest. We have people interpreting people on the global level. To zoom in on the individual words and wring our hands over individual meanings is the first wrong step. The whole enterprise of interpretation is hobbled by staring at a particular tree, and thinking that the truth is the sum of the truths about particular trees.

As

What do you mean by that? — Posty McPostface

Let's say you try to live as an X. You do your best to live up to the pose, but you find that it just doesn't work in practice. And even logically there are rough spots. So you make adjustments here and there. Or sometimes you experience a revolution and abandon the pose completely.

Two big revolutions for me were (1) self-consciousness with respect to the 'pose' and (2) meaning holism. And of course they are related. Meaning holism is opened up more and more as one lets go of the idea that philosophy is word-math because one starts to see that the word-mathematician is not the best role or pose available.

What I think 'really' happens is that individuals just get more and more complex. They understand more and more positions from 'the outside,' with a kind of simultaneous appreciation and distance.

Or at least this can happen for some individuals, maybe the irritable ones and those thirsty for the frontier.

To me there's never really been a stable system. Maybe this is a Hegelian idea, but I think every position tends to manifest some gap or blindspot.

I learned from it. I like that it is has the guts to face the monsters.

To me that's almost the central question.

Who should I be? Who can I manage to be?

Sure. I may be interrupted, but I may not.

If we are engaged in making sense of the world by imposing our a priori structure on it (''falsifying'' the world, as Nietzsche puts it), it seems to follow that the world as we experience it and the world as it is cannot be one and the same thing. — philosophy

Part of the complexity comes from thinking the distinction between the world and our image of it is itself 'within' the image of the world, threatening the very distinction of world versus image-of-world. Nietzsche's philosophy is one more piece of the endless processing or mediation. That there 'really is' something 'behind' all of this endless processing is probably most grounded on our inherently social nature. Through language we live mostly as 'we' and always with 'them' in the background. If we think maybe there is no 'world-in-itself' behind our impositions of structure, then we are already wondering who we might tell.

We might even ask what truth could even mean in the absence of the sense of other human beings, which requires also of course the sense of a shared world. It seems arguable that the search for truth is inherently social and presupposes a community of some kind, just as it starts already with knowing a language. And to start with a language is to drag centuries of history from the word go, so that a 'clean' start seems highly suspect, along with getting behind all of this inheritance (language and unconscious, unquestioned assumptions about method) that we would have to use in the first place in our attempt to get behind it.

Yes, ideas are particular brain states. — Terrapin Station

But surely most don't mean the same thing by 'ideas' and 'particular brain states.' Most would probably grant some kind of important relationship, but to say that ideas are brain states seems like a bold assertion. The natural question is how are ideas brain states? Because we have weird feedback here: the idea that ideas are brain states is just a brain state.

Also the idea of the brain is itself...just a brain state.

These reactions tell us about the observer, how they think about the work in question. — Terrapin Station

Sure, or, in other words, how the work exists for them, because the response is surely not only or even primarily thought.

I'm struggling with this disagreement between Kant and Hegel regarding things-in-themselves and would really appreciate some help. — philosophy

I'd say maybe look into the ideas of the later Wittgenstein. All kinds of metaphysical ideas break down if we analyze the individual concepts. That's because most metaphysical positions simultaneously rely on a mostly unconscious background of ordinary linguistic knowhow (which is not exact) and some wild flights of imagination and logic that stretch these words in spectacular ways, which try to be exact, ignoring their dependence on an inexact background know-how.

I don't at all agree with distinctions like that, though — Terrapin Station

I can respect that, but I'm surprised. Doesn't some some art stand out as not just clever, not just skillful, not just pleasant?

In my view--I'm a nominalist and a physicalist--only material particulars and their particular, dynamic relations exist (with the dynamic relations supervening on however the material stuff is situated and however it moves). — Terrapin Station

First, thanks for responding, and I think we have made progress in understanding one another.

In your quote, you write : only material particulars and their particular, dynamic relations exist. But I assume that you will grant that this idea itself exists in some fashion or another. How does this fit in with your view? I get the impression that you use the predicate of existence (or existence as a predicate) to filter out the real from the unreal --which is to say categorize entities into those that really ('objectively') exist and those that might or merely seem to exist. But I'd point out that these entities being categorized already exist somehow in order for us to deny their existence-in-your-sense. I'd also say that existence-in-your-sense (as I understand it) seems like just one use of the word, a use that depends on context and intention. For instance, we had to talk for awhile before we got a sense of what the other meant (holism).

I read all of that and I haven't the faintest idea what any of the alternate senses of "exist" are that you might be proposing. — Terrapin Station

I thought of one more way to approach this. I have the impression that you are focusing on whether something exists. It's a binary predicate in the same way in all of the different contexts I mentioned. But I am suggesting that the important variable is how something exists. The idea that God is love doesn't exist in the same way as a hat or an electron. The mood inspired by music doesn't exist in the same way that the rule of law exists. My sleepiness doesn't exist in the same way the alphabet exists.

Is existence really a predicate in the first place? In some contexts, it is usefully and plausibly treated that way. But I don't think that exhausts the use of the word.

In other words, it defines the ineffable and ephemeral, encapsulates them such that it cannot be paraphrased, or broken down further. And allows this to be shared. — Lucid

Well said.

Seems glib, but it's the only correct answer in my view: depends on the artist. Different artists have different goals, sometimes different goals for each work, or even different multiple goals for each work.

Any statement of the form "The goal of art is x," where x is some single or small list of things, is going to be way off-base re what's actually going on when people create artworks. — Terrapin Station

I agree, at least technically. But I think there is an implicit focus on what some might call the highest or deepest kind of art. Obviously what this is is up for debate, but I think what people have in mind is art that has a 'spiritual' resonance (is deeply moving.)

I don't think art is mainly about objective truths, I think it's more about transcendent subjective truths. — Tomseltje

Well said, so maybe the best approach is to think in terms of shared potential for subjective (feeling-based) transcendence. It's conceivable that some varieties of 'personal' transcendence are less shared than others, and that art based on this might be less popular and yet no less effective for the smaller group sensitive to it. The art deemed central could then be something like a measure of what kind of 'subjective transcendence' was most common at a given time. We can even perhaps feel our way into the spirit of a time (or thinking we have) by responding to various art works passionately.

For me it's especially about pictures of human beings (in the visual realm, anyway, which seems to be the focus here.) In this case, a picture can be worth ten thousand words, I think.

A work of art shows us something exceptional of the mind of its creator, something fascinating about what it is to be human - something we could not see alone; and it is something which brings joy and awe to the act of seeing it. I do not do drugs, but I know well the mind-expansion I feel when contemplating great art.. — Tim3003

I like this. Along these lines, I think the great artist helps us 'tune in' to something that is already there in ourselves, though not lit up as brightly as it could be and as it was in the artist while creating the art.

Great works of art exert power that is not diminished over time, power that goes beyond the normative bounds of any observer. I think this is only possible if force of these works reaches certain objective truths about the world that, if we have sufficient knowledge and emotion, can't be avoided because their power consists in their spontaneous ability to continue to generate new or deeper thoughts, newer more meaningful narratives in observers. — Cavacava

Nice post. I thought I'd point out that your definition of great art almost implies your conclusion. Or at least it's natural to me that if we think that great art exerts a power that is not diminished over time, then this timelessness must have some relation to what is timeless in the reality that we don't call art. For what it's worth, I think you are largely right.

But must we reserve 'great' only for timeless works of art? What if a work of art is exceedingly potent in its moment and yet somehow fails to move others the same way a century later? If this sounds unlikely to us, then maybe we are assuming that the 'highest' aspects of human existence are independent of time. I personally find this more than plausible. But I thought it would be nice to bring this theme to the surface.

The thought of a thinker is just another thought — Evil

Interesting point, which I've also contemplated, but it leads pretty quickly down the rabbit hole. If the thinker is just another thought, then everything intelligible is just a thought. So distinctions of mind and non-mind and self and non-self are all 'within' thought, derivative from thought. So thought becomes a misleading term. Reality becomes something like a network of meanings and sensations where the meanings are neither mental nor material nor anything, since the meanings 'bathed' in sensation are fundamental.

It's the kind of daring thinking we can engage in now and then, and then we return to ordinary functioning where the 'I' or thinker is roughly understand as fundamental in the context of the roughly conceived non-I, also fundamental. What's nice about going down the rabbit hole is that it demonstrates how 'natural' consciousness can come apart if we emphasize a distinction that is usually employed both carelessly and successfully.

Yes I bet people do throw around the accusation that some dispute is terminological quite loosely. But that's pretty lazy. It seems to me that there are various ways of a dispute being defective, and being 'terminological' or 'merely verbal' is just one of them. — Welkin Rogue

Sure, being 'merely verbal' is only one, but I think it's a big one. I think it's related to a sense of what philosophy is all about in the first place. If someone thinks of the it as a precise science like watch-making, then of course it's all about the details. But if someone thinks of it as an attempt to get a grasp on existence as a whole, then it's better to try to work backward from the big picture of the other person --and to help them do the same by emphasizing your own sense of the big picture.

I'm really liking our conversation, but I've been putting off some work. So I must go. I do hope to talk more in the future.

What are your thoughts about attitudes, macrosoft? Can they be changed, and how?

An attitude is everything after all. — Posty McPostface

You know they are central for me. They are sort-of what philosophy is really about. They can be changed. Lots of people well out of their 20s look back on their 20s as a series of experiments with a sequence of basic poses toward existence, often conveniently summarized by the heroes one took at a particular time.

Usually disaster forces us to change. But there is also just the gradual seduction of other, adjacent attitudes.

Ok, glad you're not suicidal. Joking aside, life is pretty good nowadays. We don't have to worry about being drafted in some war. We have most of our needs (apart from housing) readily supplied. Opportunities abound for a good life. We enjoy a great deal of freedom. I suppose, too much freedom to some extent. — Posty McPostface

Hmm. Did you think I was suicidal? Oh no. I'm usually happier than most even. In the most suicidal moods (thankfully rare) I have an absolute contempt for talk. One is too disgusted by the futility of communication to talk about it, which leads to people being even more surprised. There are the doers and the threateners.

On the contrary, I'm usually especially happy when I'm typing out my little thoughts on existence or my thoughts on thoughts about existence.

And, yeah, things are good on average.

I mean, that it's unavoidable and always present. One cannot escape the confines of mortality. If one attempts for the greatest of goods, such as contentment and satisfaction, that's all that can be asked for in the end. — Posty McPostface

Oh, OK. Yes, it seems futile to try and escape death. I agree. And I'd say that impermanent satisfactions and contentments are all we have, but also they are enough (if we get enough of them.)

Or they become satisfied with what they have? — Posty McPostface

Yeah, that too. Sometimes life can proceed smoothly and pleasurably for stretches at a time. Life does not have some big 'hole' in it. The world feels pretty good. All is well.

Then things go to hell. And then we usually adapt and get things going smoothly again. Repeat. Eventually they go to hell and we can't fix them. But that's OK. The children are there to replace us in the game, not really different from us.