Intelligibility can only be known by experiencing cases where it's actually understood -- implying the existence of a mind that understands it. — Dfpolis

Speaking from the perspective of common sense, I of course agree.

Still, I see myself often searching for the right word(s) to express what I think, and occasionally fail. Thus, my thoughts have priority over even my internal monologue. — Dfpolis

I relate to an experience like that, but I tend to interpret it in terms of condensation. I'm reluctant to classify this 'cloud' as an actual thought.

We check the truth of what we believe, the adequacy of our semiotic structures, by comparing them to experience. And, to have experience, we need experiencing subjects. — Dfpolis

It looks like I'm basically describing a position like James'. Note that 'experience' must change its meaning radically once the idea is grasped. It is a ladder to be thrown away. James has no choice but to use subject-object language in order to be intelligible as he tries to lead subject-object thinking somewhere rich and strange.

My thesis is that if we start with the supposition that there is only one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed, and if we call that stuff pure experience, then knowing can easily be explained as a particular sort of relation towards one another into which portions of pure experience may enter. The relation itself is a part of pure experience; one of its terms becomes the subject or bearer of the knowledge, the knower, the other becomes the object known. — James

http://fair-use.org/william-james/essays-in-radical-empiricism/does-consciousness-exist

Now I think that this wild theory can still account for what you say above. The only difference is that the subject and its experience are not 'absolute' entities but important repeating 'signs' in the stream.
I completely understand if others find this theory unacceptable, but it strikes me as an advanced metaphysical position worth considering, if only for the intellectual adventure.

This is how I think of mystical awareness:
God maintaining our existence is identically our existence being maintained by God. Because of this identity, we are inseparable from God, and the divine intelligibility, which is unlimited, and so uninformative (unconceptualizable), is always present. Recall that information, which delimits and defines concepts, is the reduction of possibility, while God is unlimited being.
Normally, we turn our our attention, our awareness, to the world of limited being. If, for some reason, we break the fixation on limited being, our intellect, always in search of intelligibility, can turn to the divine intelligibility that is always dynamically present because of the above identity. So it is that we have direct experiences of God, who being unlimited, is not reducible to concepts.
I also think that, even while our awareness is thoroughly engaged in the world of limited being, we are vaguely aware of the presence of Unlimited Being. As I mentioned above, in connection with the inner monologue and the search for articulation, this awareness can be, with difficulty, articulated. The best articulations are sound proofs of the existence of God -- structures that articulate our awareness of the sustaining presence of God.
Again, the same awareness, a vague awareness of the intentionality behind our being, is what the Scholastics called synteresis -- the inner spark driving conscience. — Dfpolis

Thanks for sharing that. For what it's worth, my own understanding of mystical awareness is not so different, though some might not grant me the word 'mysticism.' What I have in mind varies in its intensity. Nevertheless a sense of the infinite is usually at least somewhere in background. At stronger intensities I reach for phrases like 'behind language.' My influences are Christian, but this Christianity has passed through the 'fiery brook' of the Left Hegelians. For me the incarnation is central, and I suppose my mysticism inasmuch as I can keep and enjoy it is much like Blake's. The senses and feeling are not in any way put aside, and the forgiveness of sin or transcendence of accusation opens up an ability to praise this existence and feel like a son of God. For me the language doesn't matter much. In a desire to connect with others I use the words that will build a bridge. Of course I'm no saint! It's often myself I have to forgive.
Finally, for me religion is higher than politics. 'He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.' 'And He saw that it was good.'

Who says the temporal continuum needs to contain instants? Likewise who says that the spatial continuum needs to be pointy? Perhaps the continuum has no fundamental level at all, no unit with which all other quantities are multiples of.

If that is the case, then the idea of "now" as a snapshot moment in time is mistaken and the passage of time as a succession of said moments (not unlike a succession of strips on a piece of film) is also confused. — Mr Bee

Hi. I like this questioning of the 'now.' It seems to be a kind of default metaphysical assumption, and yet I argue that it does not square with experience. I think our very experience of reading complicates this now. Here's an example:

The end of this sentence specifies its beginning.

What we have read is held in suspense and anticipation. The past is determined by the future as the future is determined by the past, at least it seems within the flow of meaning. And given that 'clock time' and its mathematical 'now' exist within this 'meaning time,' we have a fascinating situation.

Its a matter of balancing pride and humility. Its knowing what one knows, and knowing the right stance to take towards what one doesn't know. — csalisbury

I agree.

why fixed? — csalisbury

If I insist that there is a blind-spot for human reason determinable by reason itself, then I have at least one sure result, in the name of this same limited reason. 'I know that you don't know.' I hold fixed not only my own distance from 'God' or 'naked reality' but also yours.

I'm not trying to take sides here (or really I'm the ironist) but trying to point out the tension in a position that seems quite humble. Indeed I think this position can be quite humble. But let's think of those who dismiss everything 'spiritual' or 'metaphysical' in terms of this kind of humility. It can be a will not to know, a dodge. 'Language on holiday' for instance (seemingly anti-metaphysical) is a metaphysics in a phrase. Is this not Anyone's metaphysics?

*I found some old writing where I was griping about Hegel being hard to read, ultimately a rationalization to give up on something that required stretching my mind. I saw this by chance recently after a poster had called Hegel nonsense and I thought 'oh brother, I was basically just like that not so long ago.' I was holding fixed the idea that content was restricted to a particular form.

To those who propose that knowledge or meaning is 'encoded in the brain' or is identical with 'brain states', what I'm trying to argue is that the faculty that grasps meaning cannot be physical. There's actually no physical analogy for whatever that faculty is (other perhaps than computers, which are after all built by us). But the fact that it's not physical, means that, for most people, then it must be spooky or spiritual or far-out or something. Whereas I'm saying in some sense that it's 'hidden in plain sight'. We actually don't understand something fundamental about our own abilities in this regard. — Wayfarer

Oh I very much agree with you here. To be blunt, our situation is freaky, mysterious, uncanny, wonderful. And yet practical life obscures this. 'One' does not talk about certain things, question certain things. I was quite suspicious of the 'spiritual' once myself. I remember my crude bias toward it. I was still rebelling against the crude understanding that I had of it in the first place. Only in retrospect when my rebellion was complete could I finally go back and see it all in a new light.

First, then, comes the development of doctrine; secondly comes its fixation. Only after that does the opposition of believing and thinking, of immediate doctrinal certitude and so-called reason, enter in. Thinking reached the point where it relied only on itself; the first thing the young eagle of reason did was to soar as a bird of prey to the sun of truth, from there to declare war on religion. Then, however, once more justice is done to the religious content also, in that thinking finds its completion in the concrete concept of spirit and enters into a polemic against abstract understanding. — Hegel

And of course 'abstract understanding' is just crude or partial or incomplete understanding, an understanding that only grasps opposites and doesn't see their unity (to oversimplify.) I also note that Hegel does indeed identify his thinking with (rational) mysticism in the shorter Logic.

was it Georg Cantor who had more or less a nervous breakdown? — Wayfarer

He wrestled with issues like that more than once. Something that fascinates me is that he absolutely hated infinitesimals. He described them as germs. At the same time he was himself offering so truly mind-bending and controversial mathematics. All of this was connected with the divine for him. The math stands on its own feet, but the man contemplated the relationship of God and the infinite.

Coming to think of it, have you heard of the book by Sabine Hossenfelder, Lost in Math? — Wayfarer

No. Haven't looked into that. I haven't really kept up with physics. I really like the tension that is already there in pure math. The real number system is eerie indeed. 'Most' real numbers contain an infinite amount of information. For this reason they must literally remain nameless. No algorithm can even approximate them with arbitrary precision. This is connected to Cantor. As you may know, there are different levels of infinity (an infinity of such levels.) Even stranger is that the proof is relatively simple. But what does this proof mean? Is this proof nothing more than symbols that have been moved around to mechanical rules? Or was something discovered about an objective realm to which we have access non-sensually? Or? I'd say that there is genuine intuitive content in the proof, but I don't know how to position that intuitive content.

I also agree with the criticism of any empiricism that refuses to acknowledge intelligibility. For me the question is what to make of this intelligibility. To deny it is to deny that such a denial is intelligible.

I'm tempted. My threads haven't exactly been taking off, though. I'm trying to minimize my annoyance of other people without just saying nothing. I'm surprised by the reception of my OP so far.

And then in some ways it makes perfect sense to discuss post-philosophy or ironism here in order to emphasize the contrast. I'd love to get your opinion on the Nietzsche quote above. It's one of my very favorite passages in all of philosophy.

So I have conveyed meaning or information to you. I get it wrong, or you misunderstand it, and nothing is conveyed and it doesn't work. — Wayfarer

Indeed. There's no question that meaning is sufficiently determinate for practical life. So please don't misunderstand my point in terms of the explosion of all meaning into mist. An easy example of what I have in mind is my thread about 'the real is rational.' Clearly these words out of context are not easy to interpret. To call them meaningless because they are ambiguous, however, is a mistake in the other direction. IMV it's the fear of interpretation that tempts some thinkers to reject spiritual talk altogether. If it's not medium sized dry goods or educated common sense it's 'nonsense.'

So the symbolic form and the information is not exactly the same thing. The text encodes meaning, but that meaning is something other than the physical form. That I find interesting. — Wayfarer

Of course I agree, and I am particularly interested in that issue myself (hence the moniker.) Meaning is 'incarnate' in text, has text for its 'flesh.' Translation as transmigration of soul meaning happens all of the time. The question might be phrased in terms of whether translation is ever perfect. And can I even read same text twice? I can of course scan the same words. But can I have exactly the same 'meaning experience'? The text is grasped as an abstract unity. It's the same river and yet it's not.

As for how this relates to idealism: the rules of thought - logic, maths, syntax and so on - actually provide the structure within which meaning becomes intelligible. Without them, all we would have is gestures and sounds. And that belongs to a different order, - as Platonists would argue, a higher order than the physical order, an which is only visible to a rational mind - the 'intelligible order'. So the 'structure of thought' is also a reflection of, or interwoven with, 'the structure of the world'; which is why mathematics is predictive (among many other things.) — Wayfarer

Yes. I understand this very well. And 'interwoven' is close to a metaphor used by Husserl. For very good reasons we divide our experience into these realms and postulate faculties. The question is whether this division is sharp and absolute. Clearly mathematics is especially pure, a-historical, sharp. But even here there is trouble. It was precisely the philosophy of mathematics that lead me to study mathematics. Its attempt to capture the continuum and the infinite led to a foundational crisis and even a schism. In what way is the number 12349823489982323423432 intuitively given? We have a faith in our algorithms. Its meaning is not as sharp as that of 2, it seems to me.

in the same way the fisherman accepts that there is something beyond fish, or methods for catching fish. theres the ocean. — csalisbury

Indeed. And I am more ironist or mystic than philosopher. But to clarify my point, let me ask you a hypothetical question. How would you react if a philosopher insisted that he understood everything? He claims that he is a fisherman who somehow caught the ocean itself on his hook? I expect that you'd be skeptical indeed. My point is that 'that which exceeds rationality' or 'the ocean' plays an important role in the game. It can function as an 'absent' center. 'I know that I don't know --and yet I know that you can't know.' This humble 'not knowing' is itself a 'vision of God' held fixed.

ut id want to note that there is a robust philosophical tradition that accepts that which exceeds rationality - and instead sets up camp at the limit. its like catching parts of the stream that are amenable to rationality. sifting for gold. deleuze and the 'plane of immanence' come to mind. — csalisbury

I guess I'd just exclude these philosophers from the narrow idea of philosophy that I was working with or include them as late philosophers who determine that which determines to be indeterminate--a critique of pure reason or of language on holiday or of the primacy of the theoretical. The key here for me is that [synonym for rationality] is the authority appealed to in order to distinguish philosophy from mere opinion. It's because philosophers don't accept 'well, God told me so' and instead demand an argument or an elaboration that (only) the rational is real. The philosopher I have in mind doesn't believe irrational claims He refuses them as descriptions of reality.

Note that this includes the rejection of claims about the 'thing-in-itself.' So even if philosophy admits its blind-spot, it does so to deny access to this blind spot to others. It 'knows that it does not know' in order to reject 'inhuman' or 'theological' claims of direct access. Kant knows that pre-critical philosophy is wrong precisely by insisting on a kind of absolute ignorance of things in themselves. Absolute knowledge in the Kantian style is knowledge of absolute ignorance or ignorance of the absolute. It's this tangle that Hegel wrestled with, it seems to me. It left humans at an infinite distance from Truth, offending Hegel's intuition that the human mind was divine.

Regarding your question about 'how meaning is able to be constant' - have a look at this OP which I started last year... — Wayfarer

Ah yes, I remember that thread. I'd just like to emphasize that I don't at all deny meaning. Indeed, I am playing with a theory that radically prioritizes meaning. Both 'mind' and 'matter' are just meanings. 'Concepts' ('subjective') and 'objects' ('out there') are both just 'formed non-form.' This 'non-form' might be called 'sensation' or 'emotion,' except these mislead us into taking the subject as prior to meaning rather than one more meaning. To be sure this is 'speculative.' No one could live by it. The continuity of meaningformed nonmeaning gives rise to a sense of being an 'I' in a world with others and objects. Some of these forms are more or less pure form. At the level of the bit ('pure' unity), we can have a science of 'ideal' information. IMV it is only math's exclusion of metaphoricity ('meaning-bleed') that allows it its exactness.
==
'Does consciousness exist?' sounds like a 'materialist' denial of meaning, but for William James this question puts 'matter' or 'non-consciousness' in the same bin of abstractions from the lifestream which is one and continuous.
http://faculty.fiu.edu/~hauptli/James'DoesConsciousnessExistandTheContinuityofExperience.htm

I don't think this idea will appeal to you, and I understand the value of a more determinate theology, one with fixed meanings and concepts. Nevertheless I think James' vision is profound and worth consideration. I understand him on this issue much better having grasped what I'd call the point of later Wittgenstein. (Obviously others could reject my interpretation of Wittgenstein.) I think this is the issue that divides you and @Janus. Is the 'spiritual' determinate? Is it essentially determinate? Is it propositional? Is the truth of the spiritual 'sharp' like mathematics? I relate this to 'incarnation. ' The Father has a kind of ideal unity. The son is of flesh. So despite my love of the labor of the concept and the idea of the concept as a labor of love, I do lean toward a 'continuous' interpretation of the 'divine.' Of course further experience may change this. I may be blind to something.

My question to you is how would you understand meaning, without some implicit or explicit dependence on mind? It seems to me that the meaning of a sign is information it evokes in the mind of the recipient. — Dfpolis

I'm happy to answer this, since this is the very heart of the issue. I mention again that the theory I'm presenting is to speculative or strange to actually live by. I enjoy it nevertheless.

Signs are beings here. What we usually divide into concepts and objects are both understood as signs (intelligible unities of sensation and emotion). Now 'sensation' and 'emotion' are still misleading subjective here. The 'subject' and the 'object' are both just signs that appear among others. Even 'God' is one more sign, though this sign can be understood as the name of the sign-stream in which it appears. The sign is the unity of signifier and signified. Note that collapsing the subject to one more sign radically changes the meaning of 'sign.' We could also use 'object' or 'being' instead of 'sign.' The 'mental' and the 'non-mental' are 'gone' here. Experience can then be understood as a sequence of signs/beings. As a final move, however, we have to consider the radical continuity of meaning. Meaning 'streams,' as I believe your very reading of this sentence shows. And note that the end of this sentence determines the meaning of its beginning. The past comes after its own future. So even 'stream' is too unidirectional of a metaphor. Becoming is not 'one-way.' One might call this is a theology of 'Becoming.' We can also call it a thought-experiment. I like that it gets us out of all kinds of problems (perhaps creating its own beyond its impracticality.)

Still, since words express thoughts, thoughts are logically and temporally prior to the words that express them. — Dfpolis

I understand this view, but I have the sense of thinking in words. Certainly one can discover something in a silent monologue and then speak out. But does this monologue require words? Or does it at least mostly require words ('signifier' along with 'signified' in an indissoluble unity?

Thus, if there were no subject of experience, 'I' and the <I> idea it expresses would be empty. They might have meaning, but that meaning would lack an existential referent. Clearly, each of us is a continuing subject of experience. So, while 'I' is a sign, its referent is not. — Dfpolis

Of course this is an important point. The theory I'm presenting as a though-experiment needs the signs to refer to one another in order to generate a sense of the subject. The sign-stream or being-stream is profoundly organized into an experience of being an 'I' who perceives itself, others, and objects in a world. Putting this theory aside, I think even in ordinary experience that the 'I' is not perfectly present to itself. The meaning of 'I' is elusive, although we use it successfully in everyday life. I've been influenced by the later Wittgenstein and Heidegger. I postulate a 'streaming' or 'smear' of meaning (including the meaning of 'I'), which is revealed by really 'looking' at the movement of meaning in sentences.

I think mystical awareness might be what you are thinking of — Dfpolis

Yes I think that figures in. 'Reality is one.' The 'streaming' I mentioned is indissoluble. What is the relationship between phenomenology and mysticism? Are mystics non-conceptual or just precisely aware of the movement of concepts?

I'm not well-read in 19th century German philosophy, so any opinion I have would be ill-informed. — Dfpolis

Ah, well Hegel used 'abstraction' in a similar way as a kind of deficient thinking of the 'understanding' which only rips things out of their context. He is a supreme holist, one might say.

By the way, great response. And thanks for taking the time.

I agree with you that the most important things are communion and community; which in some senses are the very same things. For me both consist in dispositions which are based more in feeling than in intellectual understanding; they are more poetry than science, that is. Good poetry can well do without science (although it may benefit greatly from scientific insight) but good science ( that is, beneficial science) cannot do without poetry. This signals to me that nothing is more important than feeling, and love is the primary feeling that both binds and releases. — Janus

I completely agree. 'Feeling is first.' We need concepts and metaphors of course, but this is the 'letter' and not the 'spirit.' This spirit is 'the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.' The sound of language, this arbitrary 'meaning vehicle,' is something like the flesh of meaning. This flesh helps carry the feeling of the meaning and is perhaps inseparable. We use concepts to break up a unity. But we live that unity anyway.

I would say that the future is manifested within us as anticipation. — Metaphysician Undercover

I would like to see a separation between "experience" and "future". — Metaphysician Undercover

I think this touches on a problem you've already mentioned, the difficulty of finding the right words. We have different conceptualizations of the future. In one conceptualization, the future is exactly what can't be here yet. In another, the future is possibility that exists 'now.' In this second sense we can say that human experience is primarily 'futural.'

So what happens when "experience is synthesized" (as you say), memories (experiences) are contextualized at an actively changing present, in relation to the future. So what it is which is synthesized, i.e. produced by our minds at the present, contains elements of experience as well as elements of anticipation. Therefore this cannot be properly called "experience". Our being at the present is a synthesis of memories (past) and anticipations (future), experience being proper to the former but not the latter. — Metaphysician Undercover

For me we might as well include anticipation as part of experience, especially if it dominates the 'now.' This seems to be only matter of preferred terminology though.

Simply put, the future appears to us in the form of possibility, which is the general, universal, conceptual. But the past is revealed to us as the existence of particulars. — Metaphysician Undercover

While I like this conceptualization (which is new to me), I feel the need to complicate it. Why should the future be only conceptual possibility? Can I not have a detailed fantasy or fear of the future? And a point that you didn't respond to (which I didn't stress much) is the idea of the 'living' past. This 'living past' is not our memory of what happened. It is what obscurely governs out interpretation of the present with the help of the future as possibility. It is 'invisible' as what we take for granted. We might call it the distortion of the lens which we cannot see through that lens. It is our 'pre-interpretation' of the situation, the one we don't know we have as we employ it. It can become visible in retrospect. We can see later that we were thinking 'inside the box' the box of this 'living past.' I suppose this is a metaphorical use of 'past,' since it is not what is usually intended.

the trend in modern presentism is toward a dimensional, or 'thick" present. I call it the second dimension of time, "breadth". The issue is that the "present" is defined by our presence. — Metaphysician Undercover

I think we are near the heart of the matter with this 'breadth.' My favorite approach to this at the moment is in terms of the smear of meaning. As you read this very sentence there is memory of what you have read and anticipation of what will follow in terms of that memory. The meaning is deferred. The meaning of what you have already read is not established until you have finished the sentence. The past is a function of the future, in this sense. And how does the 'present of reading' exist here? All of our conceptualizations of time depend as conceptualizations on this same 'smeared meaning' of reading/speaking and in that sense are derivative. 'Clock time' exists as a product of 'meaning time.' If meaning itself is 'non-present' in this way, then the traditional notion of the present seems to be shaken or troubled.

I thought I'd sketch what I think is the strongest non-philosophical position. I'll use 'ironism' and 'ironist' but I have a certain kind of skeptic in mind. Such a skeptic would be skeptical about being a skeptic.

The ironist doesn't completely believe in the project of philosophy but loves it anyway. The ironist identity is unstable at the level of speculation (bound of course to everyday life otherwise). The ironist is instead stabilized (if it all) by myth recognized as myth or metaphor recognized as metaphor. There's no particular reason the ironist would have to deny some other questionable faculty for grasping something like 'the absolute.' And maybe 'faculty' is still too rigid.

Hegel's description and successful demolition of the ironist in his Lectures on Fine Art applied only to egoistic ironists. Schlegel may have been in his mind, but:

For Schlegel, a fragment as a particular has a certain unity (“[a] fragment, like a small work of art, has to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world and be complete in itself like a hedgehog,” Athenaeumsfragment 206), but remains nonetheless fragmentary in the perspective it opens up and in its opposition to other fragments. Its “unity” thus reflects Schlegel's view of the whole of things not as a totality but rather as a “chaotic universality” of infinite opposing stances.

If a literary form like the fragment opens up the question of the relation between finite and infinite, so do the literary modes of allegory, wit and irony—allegory as a finite opening toward the infinite (“every allegory means God”), wit as the “fragmentary geniality” or “selective flashing” in which a unity can momentarily be seen, and irony as their synthesis (see Frank 2004, 216). Although impressed with the Socratic notion of irony (playful and serious, frank and deeply hidden, it is the freest of all licenses, since through it one rises above one's own self, Schlegel says in Lyceumfragment 108), Schlegel nonetheless employs it in a way perhaps more reminiscent of the oscillations of Fichtean selfhood. Irony is at once, as he says in Lyceumfragment 37, self-creation, self-limitation, and self-destruction.

“Philosophy is the true home of irony, which might be defined as logical beauty,” Schlegel writes in Lyceumfragment 42: “for wherever men are philosophizing in spoken or written dialogues, and provided they are not entirely systematic, irony ought to be produced and postulated.” — SEP

Are we sure he's not an egoist?

In his essay “On the Limits of the Beautiful” (Über die Grenzen des Schönen, 1794), he argues that love is the highest form of aesthetic enjoyment and can only be realized between free and equal beings (Beiser 1992, 248) — SEP

When I first started talking philosophy online, I already loved this notion of irony. I've examined some amazing systems since then, but I don't think anything has conquered the irony, which can apparently synthesize without synthesizing.

And let's not forget one of the most potent (anti-)formulations of this position:

This faith does not formulate itself—it simply lives, and so guards itself against formulae...It is only on the theory that no word is to be taken literally that this anti-realist is able to speak at all. Set down among Hindus he would have made use of the concepts of Sankhya,[7] and among Chinese he would have employed those of Lao-tse[8]—and in neither case would it have made any difference to him.—He cares nothing for what is established: the word killeth,[10] whatever is established killeth. The idea of “life” as an experience, as he alone conceives it, stands opposed to his mind to every sort of word, formula, law, belief and dogma. He speaks only of inner things: “life” or “truth” or “light” is his word for the innermost—in his sight everything else, the whole of reality, all nature, even language, has significance only as sign, as allegory.
...
If I understand anything at all about this great symbolist, it is this: that he regarded only subjective realities as realities, as “truths” —that he saw everything else, everything natural, temporal, spatial and historical, merely as signs, as materials for parables. The concept of “the Son of God” does not connote a concrete person in history, an isolated and definite individual, but an “eternal” fact, a psychological symbol set free from the concept of time. The same thing is true, and in the highest sense, of the God of this typical symbolist, of the “kingdom of God,” and of the “sonship of God.”...The “kingdom of heaven” is a state of the heart—not something to come “beyond the world” or “after death.” The whole idea of natural death is absent from the Gospels: death is not a bridge, not a passing; it is absent because it belongs to a quite different, a merely apparent world, useful only as a symbol. The “hour of death” is not a Christian idea—“hours,” time, the physical life and its crises have no existence for the bearer of “glad tidings.”... The “kingdom of God” is not something that men wait for: it had no yesterday and no day after tomorrow, it is not going to come at a “millennium”—it is an experience of the heart, it is everywhere and it is nowhere....
— Nietzsche

The passage above is just thing itself IMO. When life down here is just perfect (which doesn't happen too often), I think that passage captures the sense of being beyond all systems, behind all serious words. I think this is the grasp of the absolute that Hegel wasn't satisfied with. He wanted a conceptual elaboration. I suspect that he had this kind of feeling about his system. That system was a poem of the real. It was the truth that could be told for a 'we.'

As spectacular as Hegel is and as much as he gets right, I think 'life' is the master word in all of its anti-systematic ambiguity. The ironist as I conceive him contains Hegel. Does Hegel's system really contain the ironist? It tries. Was Hegel himself also an ironist who nevertheless constructed and presented Hegel's system? I'm guessing that sometimes he was.

This irony, the 'laughter of the gods'...

The gods laugh at man through man. Is this what humanism chases ? flees?

Forgetting this is a prime example of Whitehead's Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness (thinking what exists only in abstraction is the concrete reality in its fullness). — Dfpolis

This seems important to me. I get a similar idea from Hegel. Do you have an opinion on Hegel?

At the beginning of natural science, we abstract the object from the subject — Dfpolis

Would you not say that this happened even before natural science? The division of subject and object just seems so useful that it's hard to imagine it not being in play long before science as we know it. Along with it I'd expect there to be the 'ur-science' of unthematized induction.

Intentional realities are information based. What we know, will, desire, etc. is specified by actual, not potential, information. By definition, information is the reduction of (logical) possibility. If a message is transmitted, but not yet fully received, then it is not physical possibility that is reduced in the course of its reception, but logical possibility. As each bit is received, the logical possibility that it could be other than it is, is reduced. — Dfpolis

This is great. What is maybe not addressed is the metaphoricity of language. While some meaning can be represented as a stream of bits, it's not obvious to me that meaning in general can be.

I mean that the identical information can be encoded in any number of physical forms, and so is not explained by the data describing its physical matrix. In any case of conventional signing (speaking, writing, Morse code, digital representations, etc.) the information depends not on its physical form, but on the shared convention agreed to, implicitly or explicitly, by the users. — Dfpolis

My question is whether we can ever have pure information? Clearly we have the concept of information that is able to be 'encoded in any number of physical forms' via a 'shared convention.' But is this a merely theoretical sundering of a primordial unity? We might also ask if we ever experience the present as an instant or whether this too attaches a mathematical concept to something that is not a point.

A sign (sema) is only informative when it actually informs an intellect to reduce logical possibility -- for that is the definition of information. So, intellect has logical and ontological priority over information, and therefore over signs as carriers of information. — Dfpolis

This is a deep issue, but I think that one can (not at all must) argue that the 'intellect' is one more sign within a steam of signs that refers to relationships between those signs. This is being as signs, including signs like 'consciousness' and 'physical.' These signs can occur in such a way that 'I' have the experience of being an 'I' or an intellect. Reality would just be intelligible or informed sensation-emotion. Given our experience of language, a sequence of signs is a bad approximation of a meaningful 'beingstream' or 'becoming' where the signs themselves are smeared into a streaming intelligibility that can't be atomized. The 'flesh' of these signs would be the sensation and emotion shaped by the 'meaning' aspect of 'becoming.'

To be sure I can't just live ordinary life in these terms, and I am not particularly attached to it except as a thought experiment that resolves some problems as it brings others.

We always have to have a pair of ontic abstractions that reduce reality to some kind of orthogonal pairing. — apokrisis

What do you make of the pairing of 'meaning' and its 'vehicle'? For instance, the intelligible aspect of the voice as opposed to its arbitrary sound. Another example would be a chair grasped as a chair and the sensation organized by that grasping. One way to understand 'matter' would be as the opposite of pure meaning. Not mind but just meaning or form. These would be the poles of a continuum.

It's not clear to me that we ever have pure meaning. I think in words that are arbitrarily entangled with their meaning. I say 'sign,' and another says 'Zeichen' and mean pretty much the same thing. One could suggest that we also think in images, but aren't even these images 'formed'? To grasp something as a thing is already to grasp it as a unity, to install a boundary between it and not-it.

Great post. I like the mention of World 3. Have you looked into Husserl? Whatever 'meaning' is, it is largely objective (unbiased) and effective in whatever 'nonmeaning' is. It also occurs to me that the 'physical' is no more clearly specified than the nature of language allows. The specification of non-language or non-meaning happens within language or meaning.

by committing to determinism you forfeit any claim to rationality; in particular, you cannot support your belief in determinism by a rational argument. Thus, determinism is self-undermining (not self-refuting). — SophistiCat

Indeed, that makes sense to me.

Great Horkheimer quote. Something occurs to me 'against' the pop atheists. Let's just pretend that somehow religion was erased from the earth. Do we have utopia? No. We have ten thousand varieties of humanism clashing, just as religions have clashed in the past. While the inner experience varies, both humanism and religion are largely visible in the world as politics. There's already so much tension in the position sketched by Horkheimer above that a world full of Darwin-as-philosophy individuals would quickly schism in terms of purity and direction. Some would become radical pragmatists perhaps while others held strangely to science as an undistorted ascertainment of its Object. As I see it, we already have clashing varieties of humanism in our politics. Religion is an underdog and a scapegoat in many cases. That's one reason I like to work religious thinking into my philosophy. The alternative often enough seems to be a religion that takes itself as anti-religion and enacts the faults it projects on its scapegoat.

Isn't the point about all forms of idealism, that they're actually pointing to the fact that knowledge of the world is something that implies and requires an observing mind? — Wayfarer

I'm tempted to say yes, but I think 'absolute idealism' is no longer this kind of idealism or attempts to transcend and include it. Still what idealism actually addresses is the problem of meaning. It's possible (although highly 'speculative' or unworldly) to see reality as (networked) meaning 'in' non-meaning.
Then 'mind' and 'matter' would just be two more signs. The 'I' is just one more sign along with the 'you.' In ordinary life the sign 'mind' plays such a huge role that it's almost impossible not to think in terms of mind and its other and of meaning in minds. I think we can imagine something like the field of meaningful 'nonmeaning' as a unity. This 'nonmeaning' would be (to impose signs on the flesh of meaning) sensation and emotion, the stuff organized by signs like 'object' and 'person.' To be sure, this is too far out to live by. But I think it's possible to dissolve the 'mind' in meaning. 'I' am a 'fiction' or an abstraction from the unity.

Galileo accepted that Plato's 'dianoia', which is mathematical knowledge, is of a higher order than empirical knowledge, in the sense that the mathematically-quantifiable attributes of the primary qualities of bodies can be known with great certainty. You can also see how that dovetails with Descartes understanding of the apodictic nature of rational certainty and mathematical proofs. This is the origin of modern mathematical physics — Wayfarer

This all makes sense to me. When I studied physics, I was seduced by the classic Newtonian stuff. The ghostly skeleton of the world was a realm subject to law, describable in exact hieroglyphics. I was learning calculus at the same time. It was all very seductive, especially since movement itself was being captured in a quiet eternal language.

So this mathematical method provided a way to transcend or 'bracket out' the merely subjective and idiosyncratic. It was a radical break with medieval science, because it also eliminated telos and intentionality, and much else besides. — Wayfarer

I agree. That bracketing was perhaps a blessing and a curse. It allowed science to ignore the most mysterious and difficult aspects of existence and concentrate on the prediction and control of objects. Such concentration obviously revolutionized human life, but of course it just might lead to our extinction. We built a 'toy' that just might be too big for us. I can imagine intelligent life arriving to find our remains and putting together the narrative. 'These clever fools accidentally wasted themselves. They just couldn't work as a team.' And isn't that the problem facing us from the point of view of the 'species essence'?

So the kind of 'self-negation' that modern science engenders, is nothing like the 'self-abnegation' of the contemplative traditions which is based on the transcendence of ego. It is more rooted in the tradition of liberal individualism, the pursuit of progress and the common good. And again, it's a very 'this-wordly' enterprise. And hey, there's a lot to commend that. I really don't like the Green/Left disparagement of science and democratic values. I owe a hell of a lot to it myself. But there's a spiritual vacuum at its core still. — Wayfarer

I think you are being a little unfair here. Of course I do see the 'spiritual vacuum' in some interpretations of science, but I think you are forgetting romanticism's love of nature. If I were to go back in time and become a natural scientist, I think I'd choose biology. I'd want to be out there just looking at the animals. I can't help but think that some scientists are quietly opening themselves to what is, just amazed by it. Of course this is indeed this-worldly, but it seems like a good form of this-worldly-ness.

To end on agreement, I definitely perceive an ideology out there (Dawkins and other pop atheists) which is not at all about just looking at the world but very much about imposing itself as a spirituality. The contradiction is that we are 'just apes' who are still supposed to have some trans-pragmatic respect for science as Truth and not just an implement for prediction and control. Rorty is at least consistent. He wants to de-divinize natural science but use it among other discourses (like religion) to build a 'centerless,' liberal utopia 'where love is pretty much the only law.' Angry scientism is by comparison 'still too pious.' It's the very dogmatism that it projects.

We can begin with the most simple, what is the most evident to us, and that is that there is a fundamental difference between future and past. — Metaphysician Undercover

Indeed. And what do you think of the idea of the primacy of the future for human beings? We 'incarnate' the future, acting in the present in terms of a desired or fear possibility?

Not only is time fundamentally the substantial division between past and future, which is the present, but it is also active. Add to this, the idea that the past consists of actualities while the future consists of possibilities. So the realm of physical existence, whatever it is that has real (actual) physical existence, is the past, what has come to be, and this physical existence (the past) is continually coming into existence at the present from the possibilities which the future hands us. — Metaphysician Undercover

This is a deep issue. Memory seems fundamental here. The past exists as memory, one might say. But surely it's not so simple. I'm interested in the accumulation of meaning. The past is learned from. Experience is synthesized. The 'living' past along with the future experienced as possibility seems to govern our interpretation of the present.

So Neo-Platonist philosophers and Christian theologians studied this problem of how it is that the physical world comes into being from the realm of possibilities, at the present, as time continually passes. — Metaphysician Undercover

This is indeed a great issue. I'm looking into Derrida lately, and he seems to be questioning the presence of the present. I'm still making sense of his difficult work. It seems like a radical thinking of becoming (which may subvert the idea of 'becoming.')

Yes, I've read quite a bit of Heidegger, and though his terminology is difficult, he does focus on this problem of the nature of time, and offers some good insight. — Metaphysician Undercover

I agree that his terminology is difficult in Being and Time, but he is much clearer in his earlier lectures. And the first draft of Being and Time is mercifully short and to the point (80 pages or so). I preferred just rereading this one many times. Lately I've read his 'Emergency War Semester' lectures, which was his breakthrough perhaps. 'It worlds' ('world' as a verb).

The confusion is the worst aspect because it causes a philosopher to write one thing, then later write something else which is inconsistent, so they tend to write precious little, having not resolved the problems. Then to the reader it might appear like the writer does not have a clue, when in reality the writer is just trying to work out some very difficult problems, and provide some sort of picture for the reader. — Metaphysician Undercover

This is very good point. I've been looking into Husserl lately, and it seems he was always developing his thought. As you may know, he also tackled the problem of time. He saw that the present was 'thick' and not point-like. Anyway, the deep questions are indeed just difficult. One struggles to find the words and often has to invent some.

A true scientist does not want the world to be any way (in the ontological, as opposed to the moral sense of course), or if that is impossible to achieve at least aspires to attain a state of not wanting the world to be any way, she wants to find out the truth about the way the world is. — Janus

Beautifully put. But @Wayfarer himself emphasized detachment. I think we can all meet on this common ground. I suggest that the move basic to both 'true' science and religion is against the 'bad' subject, the irrational or ungodly or greedy or superstitious or alienated subject. 'I' strive to transcend what is merely 'I', perhaps by finding some 'kingdom of God' within this 'I.' The 'I' strives towards its 'substance.' What I seem to strive for is some kind of communion (with God or nature) or community of [synonym for good] people. Of course this has to be vague in order to point at a general structure, but I think the vagueness allows for a common ground.

I'm invisible, or maybe my viewpoint is incomprehensible. — Metaphysician Undercover

I'm enjoying your posts. I'd like to hear more about the religious conception of time. Heidegger was influenced by this and did some great work with it. So I'd like to see what else can be done with it.

"A single brain" isn't an abstraction, because I'm not talking about the concept of a single brain, our our knowledge of it, or anything like that. — Terrapin Station

What I was stressing is that the individual brain is structured to work with other brains. To think the brain in isolation is misleading. We can stare at a single brain, and we can also stare at a single ant. But the brain makes more sense individually as a node in a network with other brains, just as the ant makes more sense as part of a colony. We start with a world of objects in a causal nexus and enrich this causal nexus by determining new relationships between the objects.. We also create new objects, both virtual (concepts) and actual both to establish these relationships and to put them to work. One could even say that thinking by its very nature 'transcends' the isolated object in order to embed it in a system (nature, etc.) The 'individual' does this largely with language, which is to say with an accumulated 'we' acting 'through' this individual. I didn't create the English language I think in. 'I' am clearly largely a product of my community, and I also don't create the food I eat. I buy it with mostly electronic 'points.' This 'I' is more like one end of a continuum than something distinct (if we really just look at it live.)

. I did not ask what the terms "real," "rational," or "is" mean; I asked for a definition "for present purpose." — tim wood

I am not prepared to discuss either idealism or humanism, — tim wood

Note that the entire gist of my post was about idealism and humanism.

Because I was describing philosophy at a high level of abstraction, the words 'real' and 'rational' must retain their ambiguity here. Roughly the 'real' is what's-going-on. The 'rational' is trickier. Philosophy has been linguistically self-conscious now for a long time. Plato was already a dialectical philosopher. We as philosophers largely try to determine what it is to be rational, and philosophy is something like a permanent identity crisis. New determinations of the rational (the authoritative method for determining reality for 'humanists') lead naturally to different determinations of reality. (All of this is trivial, one might say, but I find it clarifying. I aim for a neutral description of a basic structure.)

What if you're not an essentialist? (I'm not.) — Terrapin Station

I think you are bound to misunderstand me if you try to zoom in on this or that word and interpret it within this or that narrow system. By 'essence' I mean something like the intelligible structure. If you deny essentialism (which is great), then you are still presenting the intelligible structure of reality to me. 'Essentialism doesn't ascertain reality rationally.' You are telling me what's going on (not just for you but for us), making sense in the 'name of' [synonym for rationality.].

Or rather, in my view, concepts are something that individuals perform--they're abstractions that individuals create, abstractions that range over a number of particulars, because it's easier to deal with the world via these sorts of abstractions. — Terrapin Station

I understand what it tempting about this view, but I think you are missing that language is an intrinsically social phenomenon. Individuals as individuals don't create concepts, though we must allow for occasional individual contributions to the culture. Note that the 'I' is one more word that we learn to use. To convert this dimly understood 'I' into a metaphysical absolute is questionable, in my view. It is one more sign in the system, albeit a central sign for getting around in the world.

To 'be in language' (to make sense of this very sentence and the post you responded to in the first place) is to live in a kind of 'we.' This is not to deny the 'subjective' aspect of experience but rather to make sense of it. Just as the predator makes no sense apart from its prey (or makes only abstract or limited sense), the language user makes no sense apart from the others he shares language and a world of objects with. Are you not otherwise forced to imagine a kind of ghost in the machine?

And then "essential" properties are simply the properties that an individual considers necessary for the concept they've formulated. In a nutshell, they're properties that an individual requires to call some x (some arbitrary particular) an F (some concept term, per that individual's concepts).

So while there are essentials in that sense, it's simply something that individuals make up, a way that individuals think about the world (as are concepts in general). — Terrapin Station

While that theory is a little rigid, I mostly agree, but the protagonist here is mostly the community living 'through' the individual. As children we mostly believe what we are told. We learn a language. We learn what 'one' does, how 'people like us' see things. Only as we become mature do we begin to question what 'one' does, and we still have to do so in terms of the language and values we learned from others. We turn our 'programming' against itself. On the other hand, individuals tend to seek the recognition of the community. They are productive, honorable, reasonable. The 'I' strives to become 'better,' usually in terms of recognizable values. Even Stirner, a radical (anti-)theologian of 'I,' felt the need to publish his book and share his annihilation of every claim (the claim as claim) on the individual Unique. To be clear, I understand the allure of the radically free and self-constructed 'I,' but then that's been one of 'our' values for a long time now.

Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man’s inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. — Kant

...as a philosopher my goal is to have my signs recognized by others as being objective, as revealing the world-in-common... — sign

Obviously I don't agree with any of that, either. — Terrapin Station

And your signs are here why? Maybe you don't seek recognition from me personally, but these are publicly presented signs. Your ideal community may be listening. 'Mr. Station gets it. He sees through the illusion and/or confusion.' This community can be (has to be?) elitist/exclusive. Indeed, excluding the 'bad' subjectivity is the point, the goal. Your public disagreement is a withholding of recognition from my subjectivity (as you interpret it) as not objective or rational.

Sorry if I misunderstood you. I don't mean to be rude. I'm happy to try to find common ground if that is possible.

Will someone define, for present purpose, "rational," "is," and "real"? — tim wood

Hi. Thanks for joining the thread. The very idea that 'rational' and 'real' can or need to be defined in a few other words is questionable in my view. I invite you to hunt through the dictionary from definition to definition and somehow find yourself the magical thing that nails all these words down.

Moreover you ask (insincerely?) for the very context out of which you ripped the words that are now to be defined, as if words had magical meanings in a hidden realm independent of context. This, by the way, is how Wittgenstein and Derrida extend and develop the basic Hegelian insight.

I think you miss an important point here. You seem to be dismissing my words as irrational or empty in order to deny them as determinations of reality, of what's-going-on. Is this the case? In that case it seems to me that you are after all insisting that the irrational is unreal , unworthy, not-the-case, without value. And do you not do so in terms of some universal reason--as not just your opinion as opinion? (This is the implicit humanism. You don't appeal to scripture. You reason with me in terms of a shared authority within us both, the reasonable people we ought to be as philosophers.)

Reality and rationality are qualities - accidents. Not in themselves substance. — tim wood

What is this 'substance'? Sounds like a synonym for reality. I can't be sure. I will say that I am not particularly attached to this or that piece of jargon. What I offered was what I found to be a plausible interpretation of two famous statements by Hegel. The first is in the OP. The second is that all philosophy is idealism (which is not so say the same idealism in every case.) I made a case that this was a simple phenomenology of philosophy, a mere description of its structure. I even called it 'trivial,' and yet this 'triviality' seems likely to be denied in a way that confirms it, at least to the degree that it is accurate.

Maybe it takes a certain kind of structure to talk about that sort of thing. How ever the activity of reason is seen as the theater of the real, it is missing the mark to read that structure as an explanation for what is happening. — Valentinus

If I understand you correctly, you are suggesting a gap between us and reality in its nakedness? A Hegelian might say that this gap is a negation without determination, a question mark appended to what we already believe and do. Fair enough. Hegel insisted on this instability. For me the issue is whether there really is a terminus where 'philosophy' becomes 'science.' I'd say that there is in some rough and imperfect sense, and that this would just be someone adopting a misreading of Hegel (for instance) and never finding a reason to let it go. Of course this subjectivizes the thing and transforms it into something with smaller ambitions. Hegel becomes a kind of rationally religious 'poet' for the individual conscience.

Apart from cribbing metaphysics from ancients and contemporaries, he introduced the dynamic of different people colliding in real time as the closest our experiences get to let us know what built consciousness. — Valentinus

Hi. Thanks for jumping in. I like what you say above. I'd like to suggest that Hegel had no choice in his own eyes as far as 'cribbing' from others. This is just history as system. The texts he assimilated were the 'stains' of those collisions in real time. Anyway, I very much agree about consciousness being 'built' by different people colliding. Also, just to clarify, I think Hegel is great without buying into all of his system. His philosophy is massively optimistic and a product of its time. I do think that he's a central figure in philosophy. It's hard to do more than tweak Hegel, I'd say. Even anti-philosophical positions are brilliantly sketched already Hegel.

And really part of that is the aspiration to arrive at an understanding of the absolute, an answer to the question of 'what is behind it all?' It's not unprecedented in philosophy and religion, after all: God, in the Christian doctrine, is the 'alpha and omega', source and end of everything. — Wayfarer

Indeed, I read science in its most expansive and romantic conception of itself as a 'theology' of the real understand in terms of publicly available objects (to be redundant). The feeling-tone justifies the metaphor. Nature is a goddess to see in her nudity. So perhaps the focus is simply on the sensually public (already 'conceptualized' in the ordinary sense that makes the arranging the experiments possible.) This is a 'theology' of the real that methodologically excludes its own substance (meaning). This meaning is like the optic nerve, the condition for the possibility of science and also its instituting blind-spot. The 'primordial' problem of interpreting the other (the problem of reading non-mathematical language) is simply dodged, with impressive results.

To be clear, I think one can cherish science without collapsing it into philosophy, and I ultimately don't think 'scientism' is the name of the 'problem.' The 'problem' (if we must have one) is perhaps our own individual freedom, but as it exists in others. On the other hand, we need such frustrating freedom to enjoy being recognized as freedom by freedom. But this is also as reason by reason, and 'scientism' would be one of many claims in a plurality of privatized consciences sharing a world in which they are bodily interdependent.

Due mainly to Protestantism, which 'internalised' the entire vast salvific machinery of medieval religion. — Wayfarer

I agree, and internalizing it differentiated it. We are all 'still Protestants' inasmuch as we believe in freedom, one might say. The meta-belief (the functioning absolute) is that the 'absolute' is a private matter. I intend neither praise nor blame. 'I' in my noisy idiosyncrasy who strive nevertheless to determine the real-for-us am of course made possible as 'myself' by this freedom. So the private conscience in fact strives outward for public recognition, via persuasion which is not forbidden. We can also note the gap between words and deeds here. The freedom of speech is 'Protestant.'

So to answer the question about 'objectivity' and 'rationality', the medieval mystics would have used the term, not 'objectivity' but 'detachment'. It is central to Meister Eckhardt's sermons. And 'detachment' has a spiritual quality, because it requires self-abnegation, the negation of ego. Whereas science brackets out the ego by considering only what is quantifiable and publicly-knowable, so it altogether lacks that sense of discipline introspection and self-knowledge that you find in the German mystics and idealists. It is entirely objectively-focussed on the supposed 'real world out there'. — Wayfarer

I think we are really at the heart of things here. Science in one understanding of itself (a quasi-religious understanding) is a passivity before the real. Its other understanding of itself (or the other pole of a continuum of understandings) is Bacon's implicit power-as-knowledge. Scientism (which I don't really want to hate on but just analyze) also takes the power-as-knowledge into a political context where science is a tool and not the thing itself. Indeed, the explicit worship of pure power probably doesn't even bother to make a case except ironically, deceptively.

I think we can also agree that phenomenology is also about 'detachment.' It offers itself up to things as they show themselves, without trying to control what it finds. IMV, it just makes sense that this same basic movement appears in different forms. 'Only as phenomenology is ontology possible' is another way to describe the real as rational, which is not to ignore shades of feeling and meaning but only to emphasize the approximate repetition. May we say that 'spiritual' traditions are just traditions whose jargon seems iffy to us in terms of 'our' own sacred jargon? (I do not mean to imply that all traditions are equal in their power. I only suggest a similarity in structure.)

Where the 'identity' comes from, is that the individual nous is a microcosmic reflection of the eternal intelligence. Reason, in the individual, mirrors, and originates from, its source in the divine intellect. — Wayfarer

I like this. I think we can also speak of reason as the divine intellect. To be reasonable in the highest sense of the word is to incarnate the 'divine intellect.'

Absolute knowing understands itself to be the consciousness that being, or substance, comes to have of itself. The individual, who knows 'absolutely', knows himself to be a specific individual: 'I, that is this and no other I.' He also knows this knowing to be his own activity --'the self's own act.' Yet he also knows his own activity to be the activity of substance itself: he knows that substance knows itself in his knowing...Unlike religious consciousness, therefore, absolute knowing does not take itself to be one with being that is essentially other than it, but it knows itself to be the very knowing that being has of itself. — Houlgate on Hegel's Phen.

This 'being' or 'substance' or 'subject-object' is 'God' if we like the term. I think the eros of philosophy in the highest sense is as Hegel wrote 'religious.' Again it seems that to deny this is simply to impose a higher authority. 'No, philosophy is not theological. My philosophy determines the real otherwise, in terms of something higher than in terms of something higher.'

And I think that's because of the way that 'mind/spirit/reason' became conceived after Descartes. It was Descartes' error to posit 'res cogitans' as an objective 'something'. This is the basis of Husserl's critique of Descartes, which I think is given in the beginning of the book Crisis in the European Sciences (published posthumously). — Wayfarer

Indeed, and Heidegger and other thinkers continue the demolition of this picture. 'Language is the house of being' is 'idealism' as my (mis)reading of Hegel has it. Language is the essence of the world (a 'truism' obscured by language itself), its intelligible structure for us, not me. This is initially no more 'mystical' than talking to one's neighbor about the same barking dog.

The objective is the negation of the subjective. To place objects before an isolated subject is (once one steps outside it) a massive theoretical prejudice that obscures the phenomenon of world 'and' language. I see the worldly object as an object that is really there precisely in terms of other's also being able to see it. I see it in its objectivity as the possibility of others seeing it. The worldly object (a pleonasm) is fundamentally the vision of an 'ideal we' 'within' an 'I' who strives toward this 'we' as his 'substance,' what is substantial and 'real' in himself. Personally I don't see how sincere denials of this don't simply confirm in their very denial, hence the 'triviality' of idealism which is yet 'theology' in a counter-intuitive sense of that term. Philosophy is silly from the outside, else it would be complacent common sense averse to questioning and the 'spiritual' eros and telos. 'Making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy' because that which is already intelligible is just common sense, 'prejudice,' the norm being questioned. On the other hand, it's only in terms of what is already objective or rational or authoritative that one can be heard as other than a fool. So philosophy depends on what it would overcome, the same objectivity or rationality or determination of the 'public' real (pleonasm) being questioned.

What we have with modern scientific method is a way of distilling the kinds of facts that are generalisable for all observers, and also quantifiable through mathematics. — Wayfarer

I agree. The scientific subject is an ideal, unbiased subject. It is ideal both as an idea and a goal.

A lot rests on the way that science was interpolated into the position that had previously been assigned to religion, as a 'guide to how educated folks ought to think'. Of course, when it comes to technê that is quite appropriate, but not necessarily when it comes to practical wisdom, aesthetics or ethics. It doesn't allow any space for the sense of the unknowable and the mysterious, which hems in and bounds human knowledge. — Wayfarer

Indeed. What occurs to me is that this is precisely the ground of pluralism. If objectivity is understood in terms of the scientific object or object of common sense, then everything else can only be subjective. The space for the unknowable and the mysterious is the privatized conscience. From this perspective we maintain a 'priesthood' and 'theology' of the objective (the scientific subject) but reduce its realm. In practice, I think we recognize quasi-objectivity in a wider realm. It is 'not just my opinion' that hurting children is wrong. Or rather that's arguably a superstitious way of looking at which pretends that worldly objects are perfectly established. The fantasy is that there is stuff out there which is 'perfectly' there. Somehow 'hurting children is wrong' is subjective despite the consensus while what is 'perfectly' there is not consensus, despite its mediation by a scientific consensus. In short, some 'stuff in itself' is a dead 'god' or ground of objectivity.

I'm under the impression that you believe in some kind of non-scientific non-subjective truth. I'm suggesting that 'objective' is a good word for this. Indeed, the dominant definition is still 'of a person or their judgment' that is 'not influenced by personal feelings or opinions in considering and representing facts.'

What I see is that everyone around us assumes without questioning that the theist vs. atheist paradigm is the only valid way to approach such issues. — Jake

Good point. I think those who can see beyond the fray mostly just avoid it. Others (like ourselves) can't resist suggesting a third position outside the framework which is taken for granted as necessary when this framework is itself a superstition (from the third position.) I think we are mostly ignored or misunderstood. The world just 'is' that framework to those within it.

It seems to me a rational person might examine the evidence produced by this pattern, and see that this routine which has been going on in earnest for at least 500 years, has produced nothing much but endlessly more of the same. — Jake

I see what you mean. I would, however, that some thinkers have long since synthesized these positions into a more sophisticated unity. The transformation of the divine is also known IMO as the history of philosophy. Of course plenty of philosophy has gotten stuck at this or that stage, but the cutting edge of philosophy has move on, one might say. Hegel would be my obvious go-to here. Here he is in one of his clearest texts: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hp/hpintroduction.htm

Einstein said something to the effect of doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results is the definition of stupidity, or perhaps insanity. I tend to agree. — Jake

Indeed. And that touches on Hume's noticing that induction has no deductive justification. It's deeper than that. It's in our blood. This is another thing that makes scientism a little questionable. Induction is a 'blind faith' in terms of some explicit rationality. Of course I trust induction. I can't help it. But I also can't pretend that it's not 'faith' in some sense.

https://stanford.library.sydney.edu.au/archives/sum2016/entries/induction-problem/

It sounds like that word "rational" needs to be defined before we even talk about whether determinism is self refuting. — Walter Pound

Indeed. And defining rationality pretty soon becomes philosophy's project. To determine the rational is in some sense to determine everything else. If I grant your method authority, then you do indeed give the last word on reality. Note that objectivity is authoritative for philosophy in the grand sense (for those who assume that reality can and should be determined rationally.)

*There are anti-philosophers who deny rationality/objectivity, but this is problematic if they ask to be taken as authorities.

I think the problem is that sometimes we ignore someone else's value. I don't know about you, but I have certainly done that before. It's sort of painful to think of all the people that could have increased our understanding of the natural world if we would have just listened to them. Even if they are wrong, the level of creative thinking and study it takes to create a theory is tremendous and should be rewarded. — TogetherTurtle

Indeed. We close ourselves off, often to exactly what we need to hear. In theory we need to hear, but in practice we aren't ready to listen. In practice what we need to hear my be only slightly less 'incorrect than our current views. It's all our vanity can bear? On the flip side there is over-valuing people who treat us badly when other would treat us better (politicians or lovers or friends, etc.)

I definitely like the idea of the world where creative thinking is rewarded (which pretty much assumes that the creativity is of value or at least harmless.) I suppose we come to the problem of choice again. What is positive or at least harmless? The feeling toward natural science is generally positive. With philosophy it's maybe more difficult. New ways of thinking can be perceived as intensely negative, like viruses that bring down civilizations. We are really presupposing a free culture that values freedom and creativity above just about anything else (which sounds pretty great to me, but the devil is in the details.)