All I can say is, there is a natural tendency, a flow, in nature whereby it seeks to be better realised. This is understood predominantly as the impulse to evolution. The reason or purpose behind it, I'm afraid, still escapes my understanding. But, I recognise it as a part of nature, both internal and external, as a part of me and others, and choose to direct my efforts into venturing further into fields of knowledge in search of whatever truths that may lie within. And, as it turns out, in more ways than one, we're all doing the same, each to their own capability. — BrianW

I like this too. Again I find something like this in Hegel and Heidegger. Phenomenology can be a primal science that doesn't still the flow of life because life is a hermeneutical voyage already on the way to its vivification. This makes sense of 'authenticity' and man as a 'futural' being. I am 'properly' human as I move into my own darkness as a torch that would light it up. Man 'is' enlightenment. Enlightenment eventually lights up this movement you speak of which can be retrospectively projected on the wandering and wondering that preceded it. The oak tree understands what hides in the acorn. But the oak tree can only understand this by remembering the path of its own self-consciousness toward a certain kind of completion (as enlightenment or the torch in the darkness.)

The idea is that, as one moves forward, one becomes able to perceive the next few steps ahead. Thus gradually, one is able to see more of the path the further one progresses. And, as one becomes familiarised with the path, one is able to realise more choices and, consequently, greater freedom in one's actions.
Does this make sense? — BrianW

I think this makes sense. We can describe this as the journey of potential freedom toward finding itself as actual freedom. Let's say that enlightenment is something like recognizing mind as the source of divisions and distinctions. We still have the journey of the mind toward such a realization. And the very concept of mind would have to be generated by mind upon this journey. The concepts that point at conceptualization (as the potentially self-alienating source of division) have to be generated by this conceptualization before they can point to it. So even if enlightenment is timeless in the sense of a repeatable act of meaning (a grabbing one's self from out of the 'illusion' and pain), it still has its source in confusion and time.

The teachings on enlightenment (e.g. by Krishna or Buddha) are given by teachers who've attained it for themselves. And, they give the methodology by which anyone can attain the same degree as them, but only if one is willing to put in the necessary efforts. Western (modern) teachings allow people to wait for scholars to discover things for them. This has a tendency to make people lazy and complacent. It's why we find so many people who're willing to regard spiritual teachings as nonsense without having taken the time to venture into them for the sake of better understanding. — BrianW

I really like this. Hegel basically makes the same point in his preface. He sketches out the journey of consciousness toward its own truth in a self-consciously exoteric way. The reader cannot just take some 'X is Y' proposition and call it a day. Both X and Y (signs in the discourse) change their meaning on the path. Experience is a shifting of meaning, one might say. Heidegger also speaks of a fundamental attunement. An 'eros' directs us toward 'enlightenment. The philosopher or man as metaphysician or seeker responds to a vague call. Philosophy, love of wisdom. 'Philosophy is love.' And real love is manifest in the struggle to get what is love right, to liberate wisdom from confusion.

I remember a phase where I rejected spiritual teachings as nonsense. Eventually I realized that this accusation of nonsense was something that I had got from a spiritual teaching that understood itself mistakenly as the opposite of a spiritual teaching. My rejection of the spiritual was spirituality, its iconoclastic aspect. IMV, the basic conceptual pieces of spirituality tend to be understood. The hater of the spiritual is (without realizing) hating the same idolatry that these spiritual traditions are founded against not on. But idolatrous thinking of one variety can only understand another discourse idolatrously. For instance, the modern thought of the ahistorical isolated subject is almost nakedly a thought of god in heaven, eternal and apart from everything worldly. The problem of an external world is a desiccated thought of incarnation. How can 'God' (the skull-bound ego) know anything but itself? Everything is an illusion or an approximation of the absent real. So this anti-theological skeptical and isolated ego ends up justifying calling everything familiar an illusion in the name of its own nature as...isolated ego. And anti-spiritual discourse is still directed outward at an ideal community, the scientists as saints to be, godlike when assembled in their recognition of one and the same pure reason.

This is a good point. Speaking of Hegel - I think, if you read Husserl in terms of Phenomenology of Spirit, Husserl would be doing something like - trying to show how one can remain at the level of 'sense-certainty' where meaning is present to itself. If I read POS correctly, its the story of how one negotiates the impossibility of saying what one means - very Derridean. I've been thinking recently that Sense Certainty is something like the beginning of the Duino Elegies - "Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angelic Orders?" The simple impossiblity of communicating launches the whole complex machinery of thought — csalisbury

Beautiful. This makes sense to me. As I've been reading Derrida and Heidegger's 'breakthrough' lecture about 'pre-science,' I keep returning to Hegel, especially Kaufmann's translation of the preface. We go only on the surface when we take our fundamental signs for granted, as fixed entities. The instability of signs seems central for Hegel. Finite concepts point outward and exist fully only in an evolving relationship. Any account of what is has to finally take itself into account. Whatever it is that is can and even must try to figure out what it is. Reality is 'made of' questioning (among other things.) To think the real apart from the questioning of the real has practical advantages in some contexts but seems to pretty much avoid philosophy in any kind of higher sense of the word.

More on the impossibility issue, I relate to a kind of repeating experience of solitude. No one will hear your finest words exactly as you intend them. In our best social moments this problem just vanishes for a while. Souls are transparent to one another. Everyone is really 'there,' in the same-enough beautiful place. Things are rarely this good, and for me music has tended to be involved. Drugs help too! The language of feeling is more universal perhaps. The 'absolute' is pointed at by a rock'n'roll lyric, a mix of image and sound (the birth of tragedy in the spirit of music.)

I'm thinking of something I quoted in my thread about trauma, where a therapist talks about situations in which there is an intent to communicate which is thwarted by - or at least at war with - a parallel intent to remain incommunicative. — csalisbury

That is a fascinating theme. In this case I think Derrida really wants to say it, but he's had or rather repeats an 'experience of language' that shows the non-quite-it-ness of every sign. I think the first poem is pretty close to this. Fail again. Fail better. And enjoy this 'failure' as our basic human opportunity. 'Man' as a not-quite futile passion to name himself. Man 'is' metaphysics. Or what separates us from the other mammals who indeed feel is a kind of infinite metaphorical-conceptual project of saying what is, including this same project that evolves as it articulates itself.

That seems like a fair, perhaps fairer, reading. Maybe its something of both? — csalisbury

Have you looked at Spurs? I may type up a quote, but perhaps you've looked at the part about the forgotten umbrella. I think that Derrida finds the openness he points at beautiful behind its possible terror. In some sense he seems like an evangelist carrying the good news of eternal rebirth in eternal death. So far I just keep findings modulations of Christian thought from Hegel onward. The thought of the sign is the though of the incarnation, of the enfleshing and making-mortal of 'god.' 'God' like meaning is distributed across mortals and time. Certain peak emotions remain more or less constantly present as possibility, even though conceptualization is historical. Religion's pictorial thinking might therefore have an edge in some ways on conceptual 'theology' (philosophy that aspires to saying 'it.')

Whenever I see someone new to the boards posting, despondently, about solipsism my gut-reaction is that this is someone who has been deprived of someone to trust and is looking less for philosophical engagement, than reassurance that there is no outside world — csalisbury

I like this interpretation. It helps me make sense of what is going on. Maybe I've misread some of these threads as a kind of game of concepts driven by the imp of the perverse. 'Prove to me that you are there.' 'Prove to me that I exist.' Then the perverse solipsist can neutralize all of the usual retorts with a kind of stubborn cleverness. In some ways it's trollish. It pokes the bear. In other ways it's the parade of vigilance. Belief is vulnerability is sin.

I would add recognition to the reassurance sought. The denial of the outside world asks the outside world to admire and confirm it. For me this relates to what is questionable about the alienated and isolated 'I.' It is always already directed outward toward the world of the we. It speaks the language of the world and the we in the possession of/as its utmost and ownmost secret 'self.'

But I should also be fair to the experience of isolation. One can wrestle with the most terrible thoughts and feelings while others are smiling and playing outside the window.

The event in which their is a shared focus of attention seems to exceed the signs themselves - in the same way the experience of a play exceeds the contingent collection of [actors, costumes, stage, etc]. — csalisbury

I like this. Husserl is grasping something 'sufficiently' real. There are essences. There is stable-enough meaning. Husserl is not cancelled. His distinctions are just revealed to be less absolute without losing all of their value.

As for Derrida versus Husserl, I tend to see Derrida, an earnest phenomenologist-under-erasure, trying to improve on Husserl. IMV, he wants to be understood. He intends something. But what he intends troubles every attempt formulate it, this same troubling, exactly and stably.

Derrida turns 'the principle of all principles' against any lapse of phenomenological vigilance.
...
It seems to me that it is impossible to dissociate deconstruction, Derrida's thought itself as a whole, from the experience or test of language. As we shall we, this test of language is an aporia.
...
At the very moment in which I undergo the aporia, I cannot ask what language is (the phenomenological question) or why language is (the ontological question), since these questions ask for an essence, for presence, for being, all of which, according to Derrida, are themselves made possible by language.
...
The experience that Derrida is trying to bring forth is an experience --the 'making appear' or the presence -- of the irreducible void, of the difference or lack, which is original and yet not a foundation. So the experience of deconstruction must be conceived as the presence of the non-foundation. — Lawlor's Derrida and Husserl: The Basic Problem of Phenomenology

From this perspective, I think it's even fair to think of Derrida as a negative theologian (and one too negative to embrace that as a final description.) The metaphysics of presence would then be framed then as a kind of idolatry or covering-over. As I read him so far, Derrida thinks that distinctions-under-erasure are necessary. He's still a 'Hegelian' in terms of determinate negation. He exists on top of Husserl, for instance, and he is only intelligible in terms of something like Husserl's project, as the revelation of what eludes it.

Personally I relate to some kind of 'experience of language.' Language is there like the world. It precedes and speaks the 'subject' in some sense. It precedes and speaks every attempt to get behind it or found it on some essence. Nicholas of Cusa wrote of God as pure possibility (something like that). Perhaps the attempt to found language is an attempt to dominate and cancel the future as possibility, or to have possibility now in some concentrated, neutralized form. And perhaps point at a 'non-foundation' can't help but being 'guilty' of this. What is a theology that strives to reveal its own impossibility as its completion or its completion as a vision of its impossibility? Wittgenstein's 'thrust against language' comes to mind. And Heidegger's primordial prescience comes to mind, an attempt to look around the distortions of the theoretical gaze with a perfected theoretical gaze perfect in its a-theoreticality, the old gaze that wants to see around itself.

Aside from strongly disliking the word "pure" there (partially because I have no idea what it's adding), why is that problematic? — Terrapin Station

The living sign is something like a unity of signified and signifier. The four letters S-I-G-N are just letters in themselves. In German we would use the letters Z-E-I-C-H-E-N for approximately the same purpose. So we might think of or postulate the 'meaning' of sign 'behind' both 'sign' and 'Zeichen.' But do we have an experience of this 'pure' signified apart from its signifiers? We are admittedly directed away from the merely arbitrary toward a stable meaning 'behind' every arbitrary meaning-vehicle. I interpret this is a social desire, connected to the ideal subject as the space of the signified.

If we are directed toward the telling of the truth of the situation, how does such a project initially understand the situation? I need something (a world) to tell the truth about and others to share the truth with. The truth must apparently be made of 'meaning,' and I think most philosophers presuppose the possibility of translation. It shouldn't matter that I first create the thought in English. And that thought should be open to assimilation by others (if it is not to become an elitist mysticism.) So along with our vehicle-independent meaning we need a situation-independent subject, a pure subject as space in which 'our' own 'meaning act' (the grasping of the truth) can be repeated indefinitely. In short, meaning and the idea subject are in some sense the essence of traditional metaphysics, and critiques of metaphysics that rely on them are returns to the origin that cast aside suspicious 'constructions,' leaving, however, the founding constructions untested and assumed.

No idea what this is saying. — Terrapin Station

The thought of meaning apart from all public signs is problematic. The thought of the pure subject who experiences pure meanings apart from all public signs is problematic. Nevertheless the possibility of translation tempts us to postulate pure meaning. And the possibility of soliloquy tempts us to postulate a pure subject in proximity to meanings which 'shouldn't' therefore require the mediation of public signs.

But the self is not transparent to itself. We create or shift meaning in a soliloquy. And it's not clear that we can think without signs that aren't already public. In some sense the 'I' depends on the 'we' and is always already directed toward the 'we' in its directedness toward truth and the world (as a making sense of the situation of the 'subject'.) And the then concept of a pure subject (a pure interior as the space of meaning) seems to depend on the non-subject. I use a public sign to distinguish between myself and what is public. I have to learn how to use the word 'I' and 'subject' and 'consciousness' by interacting with others.

Thank You!!

This is the best response I've received so far to the point I've been trying to make. Unfortunately, I have to go to class. I'll respond later. — Harry Hindu

Thank you for your kind response. I think this is a great issue, and I thought that we were at least in agreement on some insight that was worth clarifying. I look forward to your response.

If you don't look inside then you have to claim things such as the sentence I quoted above literally contain or are doing meaning. How could that be, though? Just what would meaning amount to re a set of pixel activations, say? Just how would pixels refer to anything? — Terrapin Station

I'd say there are reasons to look inside, that it is indeed tempting to think of meaning as internal. The idea that meaning is on the inside gets something about the situation right. But further consideration shows that this doesn't make sense as the last word. The isolated subject gazing on pure signifieds (concepts apart from phonemes) and pure sensations is itself a product of embodied meanings (signs, words in context) and an enworlded community.

Red is (mostly) the color of fire-engines because thinking (the 'pure' subject) is mostly directed outward toward the world it lives in with others. Philosophy can struggle endlessly to find the right words for what is going on with words, but all along philosophy is made possible by the survival of a community that primarily uses language to orchestrate the actions of its members. It doesn't matter if we see the same 'red' in our 'interiors.' Or it matters more that I can use 'red' to draw your intention to an object of threat or promise. 'Don't eat the red berries.' 'The robbery suspect was wearing a red jacket.' 'I'll pick you up at 7 PM. I'll be driving a red Prius.' We get used to referring to these objects successfully. For what it's worth, I do think there is an experience of 'redness' of some kind (even if this experience is only conceptually grasped or 'instituted' via signs.) But I can only point to this a 'redness' by relying on a trans-subjective experience of 'red' as a symbol used in synchronization. I name this 'private' red 'using' fire engines and roses, else why the word 'red' and not some other sign?

So if I understand the latter question properly, signs elude the question of "what is …” because they are in one sense arbitrary and inherently meaningless while simultaneously also serving as anchors by which our communal, value-constructed meanings are tethered and stabilized, this across a given cohort of beings, on account of communal consent. — javra

I like this. The signifier is 'noise' entangled with history, and therefore genesis and mortality. The signified is a timeless essence. The signified is incarnate in the signifier. The signifier is necessary though, since it's only the signifier that allows us to live meaning together.

One of the themes I really like in S&P is the idea that Husserl is trying to finally get metaphysics right. He is correcting Plato. He offers an eternal subject gazing on pure meaning purified of all noise, history, genesis, mortality. On the other hand, he needs signs in their dirtiness to construct such a vision. The notions of 'pure meaning' and an eternal subject as pure present are an effect of language. Logic is rhetoric's construction of its most social intention. Truth seems intimately related to an ideal community, what we ought to believe, the to-be-believed. I've been reading Towards the Definition of Philosophy by Heidegger, which is amazing, and speaks on the issue of truth and value among other things. Heidegger is looking for a kind of conceptualization that can grasp the 'it worlds' and 'it values' without objectifiying it. At first he considers that the idea of 'something' is terribly abstract and maybe the essence of theoretical imposition on the life-flux. But he finds or argues eventually that an intention toward something as a bare something is itself an essential structure of that flow, a flow toward to the unknown something (the future as indeterminate possiblity, the to-be-clarified situation.)

Another approach to the sign eluding the instituting question: the idea of the sign is the idea of categorization and distinction. The question 'what is....?' asks for signs. It is and asks for signification. It signifies the quest for its own nature. What does it mean to categorize categorization? Can we name the naming process? In some sense I just did. But I also just substituted 'category' for 'sign.' Signification connects to the movement toward the something mentioned above. Calling the sign 'matter' or 'mind' forgets that these distinctions are themselves instituted by signification. Calling the sign mind in matter or matter in mind might do the situation more justice. But does this get it right? Are we ever done saying what saying is? If we can say the origin of saying, then this origin is itself another sign that has saying as an origin.

I haven’t read Derrida, btw. — javra

There are just so many thinkers to read and only so much time. Let me know if you want me to send you a link to a pdf of S&P. It's about 80 pages and is thought to contain essential Derrida.

<Turns down the poetry knob> — Terrapin Station

Well this is what reducing 'mind' to 'matter' leads to. Matter gets all the embarrassing and poetic qualities of mind that materialists perhaps wanted to escape in the first place. Their own questioning and answering becomes 'matter,' and 'matter' becomes a poet and philosopher. (Or poetry and philosophy are deemed somehow unreal, paradoxically.) Is our situation strange enough to inspire poetry? I think it can be. In some ways the 'all is X' project is maybe a flight from this strangeness to the comfort of a name. On the other hand, it is also found in ecstatic speech. Maybe it's 'be astonished at nothing' versus 'philosophy begins in wonder.' We might think of opposed appetites for closings and openings of the situation.

I don't understand what this means if you're not simply talking about different arrangements of the primary substance. — Harry Hindu

Yes, assuming a primary substance, I just mean its tendency to be like persons or non-persons (that which inspires the loose, everyday distinction in its pre-philosophical ambiguity which is perhaps never perfectly sharpenable.

Different things are just different arrangements of the primary substance (whatever we decide to call it). — Harry Hindu

I'm open to this. I think it's fair, however, to question whether it makes sense to talk about a primary substance. Maybe it does. The mind (or matter in a mind-like mode) seems to aim at unifying experience this way. Let's grant your point. Then all the apparently plurality (all the different kinds of things) would seem merely to be renamed as 'arrangements' or 'modes' of a primary substance. So there is 'really' just one kind of thing. But it's the nature of this primary thing to express itself not only in different modes that ask for useful and illuminating categorization but also this categorization itself.

The primary substance has to be the kind of thing that can mistake itself as a plurality. Moreover the primary substance has to be able to exist in the form of the question too. The primary substance unveils itself as primary substance, within time, by having a conversation with itself. So it also has a memory. It is (or one of its arrangements is) a speaking, thinking mode of primary substance (tempting us to call it a subject all over again.) It is also the world in which these subjects converse. Even if 'mind' and 'matter' are 'false' categorizations in some sense, they are inescapable at least as the ladder with which primary substance learns to grasp itself as one and homogeneous. [All this is just following out the implications of there being a primary substance and us becoming aware of it and how it happened.]

If there is no difference ..., then it doesn't matter what we call it. — Harry Hindu

I agree with the spirit of this. Substance is subject, or subject is substance. But either way this subject or substance tends to divide itself into...subject-likeness and substance-likeness, things who might love it (us as matter or mind) and things that are just there, in the way or useful.

It makes no sense to call the substance outside of you one thing and the substance inside of you another. They are both the same substance because they interact.

Now, what do we call the substance? Does it make a difference? — Harry Hindu

I'd say the distinction is imperfect but useful. I agree that their interaction shows the limitations of the distinction. At some point these issues lead back toward meaning and language. While I understand your point, that interaction implies identity of type leads to abolishing just about all distinctions. The world is full of different kinds of things that interact. We perhaps categorize them according the specifics of these interactions. I don't interact with a human as I do with a can-opener. Both are just things (share in being and maybe a causal nexus) from a point of view of maximum abstraction, but this doesn't say much. It just grasps them as separate and otherwise indeterminate unities.

I don't think anyone is a materialist/physicalist to be dramatic or edgy. What we're saying is simply that mental stuff isn't something different than material/physical stuff, contra claims otherwise (for example, from Wayfarer). — Terrapin Station

I don't mean edgy as in disruptive. I mean that the weight of the idea is reduced as matter swallows what used to be called mind. At most the distinction can be theoretically abolished. We live 'toward' two basic kinds of entities, persons and non-persons, in very different ways. I talk to persons. I care about what they think. I don't talk to beer cans (usually). We live a certain dualism in a way that makes any reduction highly theoretical and secondary, one might say. (Really we have something like a continuum, because we don't experience or act toward dogs, for instance, as we experience clouds or stones. We can already pity an ant and wish it on its way. )

What is its "charge"? I'm not sure what you're referring to there. — Terrapin Station

If we say that everything is matter and yet that matter includes mind as a process, we aren't saying much in some sense. The drama or edge of the initial statement is quickly replaced by a sense of renaming the same old experiences. If we say everything is mind, it's the same situation. In both cases the concepts are stretched beyond recognition in a false overcoming of the distinction. I'm not saying I embrace dualism as some final position, but I do suggest that we all tend to be part time dualists in action and attitude. To propose collapsing the issue ('all is mind 'or 'all is matter') is the rely on both concepts in their difference implicitly. I propose such a thing to others about some kind of stuff that is not only those others but also the very proposition itself and the ground we walk on.

The materialist just says that the mind is matter and there you go, now mind is just a process of matter and we have immediate access to matter. — Harry Hindu

I'm not for or against mind as a process of matter versus matter as a process of mind, but something occurs to me. If matter includes the process of mind, then the 'immediate access' we seemed to gain is lost. I only have immediate access to matter if I have immediate access to its mindlikeness. I would surely, I might think as this materialist, have immediate access to myself as a process of matter. And yet I keep questioning and overhearing myself, as matter exploring matter.

It seems to me that trying to collapse either concept into the other just sweeps the complexity of the situation (which inspired the imperfect but serviceable distinction in the fist place ) under the rug. And for the materialist, this very conversation about matter is a mode or process of matter. Which is fine, but matter is more or less the same protagonist as mind at that point. Matter does philosophy. And the idealist crashes into 'mind' that also known as a telephone poll, glad that it wasn't a human with a mind in the limited sense of mind distinguishing it as something not 'in' telephone poles.

Materialism is 'the doctrine that nothing exists except matter and its movements and modifications.'
Matter is 'a physical substance in general, as distinct from mind and spirit.' So a materialist would seem to understand 'mind and spirit' as a movement of modification of matter.

Fair enough. But what has really been said? 'Mind and spirit' are 'really' just modification of 'matter.' But then matter is so mind-like that materialism loses it charge.

Idealism asserts 'that reality, or reality as humans can know it, is fundamentally mental, mentally constructed, or otherwise immaterial. ' Also, 'idealism believes consciousness and mind to be the origin of the material world and aims to explain the existing world according to these principles.'

Fair enough. But what is consciousness made of? Experiences of 'matter' and other 'consciousnesses' it seems. 'In' a world that makes it possible (or 'is' it) even as it makes the world possible. ' The concepts of mind and matter seem to depend on one another. To make either side absolute is to destroy the master word at the moment of its institution. And it would also seem to be a strategic ignoring of who and why we have such a distinction in the fist place, in a quest for 'the night in which all cows are black.'

I think heaven is a state of consciousness not a place, one should try to be beneficial or at least harmless for its own sake. — Noah Te Stroete

Those are a couple of my favorite ideas. The goal is a mode of existing. 'Virtue is its own reward.' The desired mode is fundamentally giving and friendly. What I like about this is (among other things) the proximity of 'heaven' and the 'divine.' It's something we are always already doing, at least intermittently. One vision of philosophy (among so many others) is that of the kind of thinking that gets us to better or more frequent versions of this mode.

The debate here is whether materialism as a theory has a stronger foundation that immaterialism. — Jamesk

Well I will leave off if others want to keep on that level, but I think the problem can also be dissolved or transformed by looking at a deeper structure. What does it mean to have a stronger foundation? It's hard not to think in terms of what an ideal community believes (what our community ought to believe.) And it's something we ought to believe about the stuff that's already here, in which we live and from where we speak in the first place. What does it mean to name it 'matter' or 'mind' in this context? What are we deciding exactly? If everything is 'matter,' then matter is the kind of thing that talks about itself. If everything is 'mind', then mind sometimes acts like a tree fallen across the road when we have somewhere to be, a tree that 'you' with your truck can move out of the way for me, a tree that we don't feel bad about sawing in half.

We can never independently observe ourselves and so we cannot 'step outside' of this perspective that traps us. — Jamesk

I understand what you mean, but I think we are something like a movement against this bias, directed at an ideal community that makes truth valuable and intelligible in some sense. To think that we are trapped in a perspective is already a move against that perspective from outside that perspective in some sense.

All you ever experience from objects is the idea of the object, never the thing in itself. — Jamesk

While there are good reasons to think this way, it's still a metaphysical construction. Hegel and FIchte both made fascinating critiques of this proposed origin or law of thinking. The thing-in-itself is one more thought that wants to point beyond itself. So now we have two thing-in-itself entities. Our idea and what it points to. But then we have three, because the second thing-it-self is an object of consciousness too. I'm not trying to take a dogmatic position here but only mention some problems with that as a foundational thought. From another perspective I very much believe in only partially known objects. Such objects make conversation possible, it seems to me. Perhaps the 'thing-in-itself' is something like the dark of the future, the unsaid, the potentially-experienced projected as a paradoxical entity. It is something like a basic structure. I see the front of the house and 'know' that it has a back. I know that you in the back yard are seeing the same thing, but some other aspect of it. Is the thing-in-itself a kind of public unity of possible and actual experience?

Thanks. I am writing a reply. Great issue.

You accidentally quoted me as saying your response.

...the sign is that ill-named thing, the only one, that escapes the instituting question of philosophy: ' what is ....?' — Derrida

Why does the sign escape this question? I have my thoughts, but I wonder if others like this line and have something to say.

Beautifully expressed. I agree. The idea of mind-independent existence falls apart in some sense. But I also think the thought of the subject depends upon objects-in-common or individual-independent entities.

IMV, it's useful to look behind the proposed metaphysical names of these 'socially' real objects to the fundamental structure of communication. What does philosophy presuppose as philosophy? And is presupposition even the right word? Are we talking about a basic or pre-theoretical structure of experience as among things and others? These 'things' can be thought of as concepts or the opposite of concept (the 'noncept' of mind-independence), but what is the structure beneath the debate that makes the debate possible? To debate reality is to assume something in common with others with whom one debates. It makes no sense to debate the nature of that which is not mutually grasped as important, as in-some-sense real and talk-about-able. And unless we are always only talking about other debaters (which I can't make sense of), we are talking about non-persons, things of some kind, be they rocks mistaken for ideas or idea mistaken for rocks.

In short we live (as we theorize) a 'pre-theory' that makes theory possible/intelligible in world with others containing things that can be talked about (including the strange notion of that world itself and all the others as grounded in a fragile, functioning brain. --itself grounded in that world with the others.) Arguably this structure is far more important than any metaphysical terms fastened to its 'nodes.' The 'we' precedes any theory of the 'I,' even as the individual human body among other bodys makes this 'we.' 'We' is made of you and you and you and lives like a distributed ghost across bodies, faces, and voices. The enworlded community finds itself only through its members, who find themselves in an enworlded community.

"Similarly, in Philosophical Investigations he rejects the theory that we might have developed a language for reporting our sensations without the help of the language in which we describe the external world, on the ground that such a language would fail to meet a requirement that must be met by any language."

Where I am lost is, I can't tell apart the language used for reporting our sensations and language in which we describe the external world. — yonlee

One perspective that occurs to me is that red is the color of fire-engines because the socially synchronizing function dominates and maybe even produces 'subjective meaning' in some sense. What is time? I don't know exactly but I know that I will lose my job if etc. And I know that I care about having the rent without possessing the metaphysical truth about rent (which depends on the truth about language). So I do understand how to participate in the concepts of time and rent.

The question might then become why we ever looked inside for meaning? And we have to do justice to being embodied and sometimes alone with our thoughts that we'd want to share with others, get them to participate in. The self is something like potential community in the midst of actual community. Why do I want to talk about red as pure red and not the red of firetrucks? An aesthetic motive, a philosophical motive. I 'thrust against language' especially perhaps when I want to share some high feeling, associated perhaps with the recognition that 'God as love' or 'an experience of the nature of language.'

When you start walking, you might find the map is not quite right, bears may attack you without warning, there was no mention of the swamp you will have to circumvent.

If you survive, you might want to make a new map. — Valentinus

I like this, and this is itself a map to aid us in the journey or our map making on its journey into its blindness.

Berkeley admits this but says that his 'notions' of minds and God are immediate to us in a way that matter is not.

Is he right? — Jamesk

Is reality partially made of questions? To that degree, he has a point. Any description or name of the real that forgets the question and its own naming seems forgetful.

A certain vague dualism may dominate all talk to the contrary. We treat people and things differently. We don't feel bad about kicking a rock. We are quite interested at times in how another 'object' sees the world and perhaps questions it in a way that changes the basic project of our life. To me we are 'primarily' in a vast of world of things and others who also see these things and others. If we drop any part of this (however we might slap 'mind' or 'matter' on the rocks we can kick), our own participation in philosophy becomes unintelligible. What are we talking about and who are we talking to? Maybe the rock is a 'piece' of the overlapping or distributed subject, whatever that means, or the manifestation of some non-mind substrate, whatever that means. But we will find ourselves distinguishing between the pieces of the subject that we can talk to and the pieces we can kick, an ontology based on how we can treat and what we want from beings. (The move from rocks through germs and insects and up to mammals in our sympathy looks like a continuum.)

If the structure for persuasion isn't there, no one will come. — Nils Loc

Excellent point. And if our speaking is directed outward in order to change (initially) the imperfectly mutually experienced conceptual and emotional realm, this structure of persuasion might always be there in some sense, so that we can think of different manifestations of the same-enough good-enough 'truth' directed at a particular audience.

Those who seek the guru will only listen to the anti-guru to the degree that he is recognizable in the guru role. It occurs to me that seeking the guru for answers already answers the question to be asked in some sense. What's the truth about truth? What is the real science? Who I bring these questions to already answers them in some sense, yet not completely or I wouldn't ask. And if I think I already kinda know, then I still want to talk about it, and I still need the right want better and better words. So into the darkness of the future as gloriously unsaid....

If we answer instead that the source of the illusion of division is the medium of thought itself, then all of the above can be swept away in a single movement. — Jake

But only in the doing of it, perhaps. To think the other of division is to divide. Division's other is a product of division (while maybe division is simultaneously a product of its other.)

If the problem and solution is basically simple the "clerical class", by which I mean all teachers, gurus, priests, philosophers and shamans etc, are no longer needed. And so the authority generating machine of all religions and philosophies works to make sure the subject remains complicated, elusive, in need of experts. — Jake

This is beautiful and gets to the heart of the issue. For me the tricky part is that the best gurus are always anti-gurus. The anti-guru or anti-try position has to be remember and imposed against 'positive' positions to be heard. It has to posit its own negativity (be 'positive' and exist in division.) And it wants to speak itself, at least sometimes. The 'real' shaman is, in other words, the anti-shaman who remains necessary in the context of a tendency toward mystification and distance. The overcoming of mystification and distance is itself (in some sense) a last form of such mystification and distance, inasmuch as it exists still as a goal, a to-be-had. And if one falls in love with this project then one is only at the beginning of its implementation. The self becomes a darkness to be explored for unseen mystification and distance.

So, to find the absolute, we must first find the part of us which is tethered to reality. And because reality is absolute, it means everything is tethered to it. This tether must be constant for as long as we are a 'something' within reality. This means that, no matter our changing thoughts, emotions, physical body, etc, there is an unyielding connection to reality. This, I believe, is what is designated as 'self' (or atman in the Bhagavad Gita) and is the distinct connection with reality. Having realised this 'self' it becomes possible to know reality. — BrianW

Very beautifully put. Spirit has to lick its wings clean to know itself as spirit.

one may be said to be enlightened in comparison to those in the relative state. — BrianW

I like this as a line that brings everything down to earth. Instead of viewing enlightenment as some static state (perfectly present in silence stillness), I think it makes more sense to think in terms of a generally better sense of life. We can talk in less suspicious terms as a more pleasurable way of thinking and feeling about our situation. The vulnerable individual is still down here. He or she is just in touch with a valuable mode of being, intermittently and yet with a poetry that overhears and edits itself. (Scientism thinks it denies itself this pleasure, but lives to sing its own praises in the same way.)

I think it is confounding the absolute with the relative. When we think that all there is to us is the relative (or limited) life, we fail to recognise the fundamental on which everything is based - Reality. The absolute is that part of reality which remains constant, while the relative is that part which undergoes change or manifests as activity. — BrianW

This to me is the thought of the pure, eternal present -- the 'pure witness.' This 'I am' at its most general, the 'I am' that anyone (and therefore no one as one ?) can say. Or maybe this 'witness' is too self-conscious. You might be pointing at being itself, or the possibility of being, the space for beings.

Do we abstract this present as an ideal object from a language that can only live in time and incident? It occurs to me that the possibility of the creation of the pure present (as fiction) can be thought of as constantly present. The pure present is truly universal, maximally social. Is this its value? And, or, or in other words that it doesn't die? Why is it good (do we tend to find it good) to recognize as reality that which remains constant? Or the unchanging space of and for changing things?

I like what @Jake says about transcending the sign-system itself, eschewing the articulation of the absolute as its self-violation. 'Don't try.' The mistake is assuming there is a mistake. The pursuit of enlightenment is the impossibility of enlightenment. But grasping just this is an enlightenment through concepts after all. The absolute has to violate itself with noise to grasp itself as silence. The silence is the neutralized memory of noise.

I've been dwelling on a different concept-celebrating notion of enlightenment based on self-consciousness through concept (basically a stew of Hegel and others I'm reading.) We can just as easily celebrate the concept in its systematic and immersed-in-the-sensual-and-emotional (enfleshed and enworlded) movement toward its own darkness, the always-failing always-striving self-articulation as pure opportunity. (Or, if we just want to put it in simple words, philosophy is already heaven. Philosophy is is a prayer and praise directed at philosophy.) I associate these ideas with Hegel, whose theology (and therefore god as seed) celebrates concept as philosophy's possibility. 'God' waits in the future, a future that is the life of theology-philosophy as well as its continual death (a death attached to it, as a dog to a tail.) Man would be a futile passion if he could not mock himself as a futile passion?

Here's a little defense of the grand language and quasi-religious feel. 'Philosophy shouldn't talk about god.' Why not? Philosophy is after truth. Philosophy is atheistic. And what is this truth? Why this truth? Philosophy must already be telling the truth about itself, have truth, be truth in order to decide itself for truth, a truth it must already talk about. Is the secret of eternal truth just an ideal community to be? in the self-making? And directed always others and one's own to-be? Does the decision (that philosophy is after truth, for instance) ever see itself? Or does it lose its fixity with its appearance for itself? 'I didn't know I believed that. Do I believe that?' Philosophy is doubt. Why? Doubt is good. An intention blind to itself in its movement. A basic structure of affirmation, if only the affirmation that affirmation can be 'sin' (not done among nice people.) Doubt is good. The atheistic or agnostic question is 'God,' incarnate in the strict atheist, an example toward the founding of an ideal community-to-be --and that which exists for this community is the real. The world exists 'for' a passionate subject, and yet this 'subject' is passionate about its own boundary, the to-be-seen world-with-the-others, becoming more and more a 'we' as opposed to an 'I.'. The 'subject' is a movement toward substance in its highest sense, a sense that includes ideal (necessarily translucently veiled) community, 'god', 'truth.' And substance is a something that determines what this same something (itself) is. The word 'god' stores the non-technical motive of even the most mechanical and deworlded of philosophies. What does it mean to want to be taken seriously?

Thanks. I wish I could claim those metaphors, but they are mostly borrowed.

As for increasing self-awareness, that is indeed one of my favorite ideas in philosophy. And really we have direct experience of a consciousness that remembers and transcends what is has been, thereby increasing in its possessions and complexity. This consciousness creates its own nature in some sense, since it can only determine its own nature according to what it has already manifested. As it says new things about itself, it adds to this same nature, opening up new possibilities for self-determination.

Indeed. I just singled out one line, but the quality is reliably present in other lines too.

because red is the colour of fire-engines, not the colour of fire-engine-sensations. — unenlightened

Just wanted to pop in to say that this is a beautiful line...

If your reality is all a result of your ideas, your design...

Then why the fuck are you asking anyone else anything at all? Better yet...

How? — creativesoul

Have you seen this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2bPTs8fspk

What does speech presuppose? I'd say the ear of an other, if only a self-as-other in soliloquy. And does not speech presuppose the priority of speech over silence? That it is worth the trouble to speak? What precedes any question, making any question possible? Likewise, what precedes every thesis? I think this is what you are getting at. The sign is launched at an other in the same world, it seems to me.

Before all the fundamental distinctions of thought there seems to be an opened-ness outward toward which these distinctions are sent on their way.