Yeah, the material art form is a private ( but can be public ) language invented by an artist ( in modern art ) very similar to the words we now exchange, and also interpret.

Information theory describes this same process of me imbuing a message with meaning, and you interpreting the message, but with slightly altered meaning. The information has to exist in some physical form in order for this to happen. — Pop

You say it has to have physical form, but does an idea have physical form? That's a loaded question; look: you set out to define art, that means talk about its essence, what makes art, art. You would need to do what holds for language: the medium is just the catalyst, the vehicle through which art is communicated. But the real event is interior, in the interpretative milieu of mind. Also, you would need to identify what this essence is. Is it form? And what is meaning as an aesthetic idea, not what language produces fit for a dictionary.
See Dewey's Art as Experience or Clive Bell's Art. Perhaps you're aware of these. Have you read Danto, or George Dickey?
The reason I am saying this is that art is certainly NOT information in its essence. There may be an informational dimension to it, just as classical music needs a score, but the score is not the art (though it may assessed on other aesthetic grounds). Sorry, but I just don't see this.

I understand where you are coming from, but strictly speaking, anybody can deem anything to be art.
It doesn't happen often, but this is a definition of art, so this needs to be taken into account. — Pop

Anything can be art, true. But what makes it art when we say, that's art? Driftwood in a pond is not art. But then, I say it is quite beautiful. This is an aesthetic judgment. What happened to the driftwood itself? Nothing. It happened in me.
When I call the driftwood art, this is not an arbitrary judgment. The reason why anything can be art is that all things possess something that evoke an artistic response. What IS that?

That is the intention. Consciousness is endlessly variable and open ended - just like art. How about that? As consciousness changes, so does art historically. A different consciousness creates different art, etc. And on the audience side, it is the same ( as described above ) So art is a meeting of consciousness, where the success of a piece depends on this relationship, rather then on any particular form present in the art work. — Pop

Grant you that. We don't know what art is in any definitive way (though, the metaphysics of art has a say here. After all, what is value, aesthetics?) But my point is that calling it information does not further enlightenment.

I, on the other hand, get so tired of the subjective nonsense I hear about art. But you see, I need to be severely logical to define something. If done successfully, then a definition can be used to predict, and I think his one can do that. It is what makes it different, what makes it interesting, imo. The world is full of romantic drivel about art, what it lacks is a definition. — Pop

One don't want to say what art is with romantic drivel, but then, romantic drivel is amind the thing the definition has to address. And what does predicting something have to do with defining art? Does this mean with your theory, an object that comes up can be measured by a reliable standard to make the determination as to whether it is art or not? How?
That subjective nonsense has to stay where it is, unless you go deeper into the foundation of art. The more your ideas rise above the particulars of cultural entanglements, the less contingent it gets. But here, the same objection comes up: The most general, foundational view of what art is, as with "art is significant form", has to be about what the aesthetic is and this is a question of value. Without talk of the aesthetic, then it might as well be talk about talk, about words, symbols, and their dictionary meanings. This is why Clive Bell insisted significant form was what evoked "aesthetic rapture" which, as you know, varies, hance that annoying subjective nonsense when you move from the general to the specific.

Art about art, creates a certain reality for art. Whereas a definition of art refocuses art to the question of "what is consciousness". And there starts a journey of self discovery, and perhaps discovery of what it is all about, such that it brings back some meaning to the question of what is art. As you have intimated, it is all consciousness, so there are no limits to this question absolutely. I have defined consciousness as a process of self organization, but I do not know what self organization is - the whole universe is self organizing. And this is also what all art is expressing. There are no limits to the form of self organization that we can take, but in understanding this we come to understand ourselves better, and perhaps also what it is all about?? — Pop

Art is a manifestation of self organizing, but so is language. And, of course, anything and everything can be art, and this is certainly true for language. But why do you think the analysis of the nature of art rests with organizing? The driftwood above is transformed into art at the immediate, perceptual level, and the receiving mind is an organized agency, but what is experienced is not organization.
You sound like a formalist, like Clive Bell (above).

Incidentally Pop, I can be pretty plain spoken and direct. Some can be offended. You handle this very well.

1.    Art is an ungrounded variable mental construct: Objects are arbitrarily deemed to be art. Art’s only necessary distinction from ordinary objects is the extra deemed art information. Art can be anything the artist thinks of, but this is limited by their consciousness. — Pop

Arbitrarily? That would mean art is nothing at all. Take a signifier in language: entirely arbitrary whether it is 'tree' or 'namu' that is used to designate that tall thing with leaves. Interchangeable, making no important distinction as a phoneme simpliciter. But when I take up an object as art, the "as art" is contingent on certain distinct features of the way it is taken up.
So no, not arbitrary at all.

Consciousness is not just awareness but all mind activity, interwoven with the subconscious. What art can be cannot exceed consciousness. — Pop

Now THAT is arbitrary, to pin art's limitations on what one is consciously capable of: Who? My possibilities are different from others'. What is consciousness if not an historically constructed agency? Thus, it is unfinished, indeterminate.

Everything is reducible to information, as it is only from information that we can create mental constructs. This is widely accepted in science, and a grounding for the definition. 

4.   If everything is reducible to information, then so is art. It is true to say: art work is information. — Pop

I can't imagine a worse word for talk about art. Plain, connotatively UNaesthetic. Like describing a fresh spring morning in terms of molecular bonding.

5.   Art work information is imbued with the artist's consciousness:  it arises out of their consciousness, and reflects their consciousness, and is limited in scope by their consciousness, in the past, present, and the future. — Pop

Why not all this, but leave the artist's consciousness out of it? After all, art is as it is perceived, and the artist is just ONE perciever.

This is best answered through information theory. It seems information is something concrete such that it changes our neurology, such that we become conscious of it. So, an artwork can not be immaterial, it needs to be in the form of something material, including sound, such that we can perceive it. The form of the artwork interacts with the form of our consciousness - this interaction creates an experience, where the quality of the experience is normally attributed to the artwork, however we ourselves play the major role in creating it.

A thought itself is not immaterial either, it has it's neural correlates. This definition is an artwork. It comes close to what you are describing. — Pop

I would put the entire enterprise of art creation in the mind. An object in the world is nothing at all until it is invested with meaning by an interpretative agency. You and I see the same cloud, but you see a camel, I see poodle. But wherein does the poodle/camel difference lie? A piece of driftwood floats by unremarkably, then I say, observe the contours, the way the shadows play on the surface, isn't the aesthetic affect interesting? The whole matter of what makes something art lies in the interpretative taking the object "as" art. The material presence is simply the medium, which is incidental.
Not sure why 'information' is helpful. Information is an affect-neutral term, and its connotative values are entirely counter to aesthetic possibilities.

Art is humanities expression of itself.

Art gives us insight into the artist,



Art is a concrete manifestation of human thought – a manifestation into concrete form, of something that is ( ungrounded / virtual / computed / experienced emotionally / believed / valued / perceived / subconscious ) - consciousness — Pop

But then, what of the part of art that is not concrete? What of conceptual art? Sure, something concrete there, but the artwork is not just this; it is a concept. Isn't thought all by itself inherently art? Why do we need the concrete?

I hope that I didn't say something bad or that offended you ... — Alkis Piskas

Not at all. I am behind in responses. Was there a question I missed?

Isolated from the world, from others. The basic myth of modern philosophy, one might say, is a version of the picture-box soul. Then one can ask whether we can be sure of anything, whether one is 'really' a brain in vat. One also assumes that words have their meanings inside, within this box where they 'really' live, infinitely intimate. 'I know what I mean, even if I can't say it.' That goes with this myth. Words are vessels for isolated self-stuff (meaning). But this picture of the picture-box is itself taken for granted by skeptics who misunderstand themselves as radical. That's there's only and exactly one of 'me' in here....that the ego is singular. Why? Because we count one body? Because the 'fiction'/artifice of 'self' is used to control this single body? Blame and praise and train this single body?

This is not to say that we 'really' have 20 'souls' or no 'soul.' The point is to point out that which is ontologically farthest as it pretends to peep from the mirror. — Zugzwang

Sorry for not getting back sooner. I am behind and it will stay that way I'm afraid.

Not sure which modern philosophy you are talking about. Brains in vats raises an epistemological issue, which is no myth. When you say "me" what do you have in mind? You seem to be saying the ego is not singular? Is the self a fiction? Words don't have meanings inside?
There are many claims packed into this.

A real question. Your real question. Not the real question. — Fooloso4

But I do think there is a real question, but is IS a question, not an answer: an openness at the level of basic questions. I think there is a real answer, too, but its substance lies in intuitions that are alien to familiar thought.

This has not been my experience. It remains my understanding, but the more closely and attentively I read and the more I am helped by other more advanced readers, the more I learn and the more my understanding is altered. — Fooloso4

As I see it, what is shared and what is hidden can be very close, as is illustrated by, say, the politician, who spends so many hours in the public conversation that there little room for truly private thoughts and experiences. Such conversation tends to be factual, statistical, perfunctory, programmatic, and so on. Step away from this agreement, and the world can become very alien, which is a motif of Moby Dick, which I mentioned earlier. This is the beginning of what I would cll enlightenment.

The problem of the author's intention should not close you off to listening to the author. Listening cannot take place when the reader assumes that the author cannot be understood, when the reader assumes that the real questions are the ones she asks, that there foundations that must be built on rather than toppled. — Fooloso4

Or listening occurs when the reader observes a failing of understanding within, and the ideas presented address this. And I disagree, in a qualified way, about "foundations": Reading others builds foundations, clearly, but in philosophy, these foundations reveal their own finitude, if you will. I mean, the question always remains open in all lines of inquiry when basic questions come to light. One is made to simply continue thinking and resign oneself to the building enterprise, or put it down and allow philosophical insight to do its job, which is disillusionment in foundations. This, I argue, is what Hindus had in mind with jnana yoga, an exercise in apophatic philosophy. After all, it is not ideas we are trying to understand here; it is the world.

Quite the opposite. It is a matter of practice, of allowing a text to open up, of learning to read a text on its own terms. — Fooloso4

Put it like this and what you end up with is "on its own terms" which sounds apart from your terms. I am saying all "terms" find their mark only in what receives them. Is philosophical knowledge to be treated like information?

The practice itself is cultural heritage. — Fooloso4

It is discovered IN cultural heritage, true. You could say I am an historical construct made of this heritage and I am inclined to agree. But then: there are two selves, the one so constructed and the one that second guesses all of this in philosophy, and the basic level. This latter self, I argue, is discovered apophatically. As to its nature, it is Other than culture; it is the existential grounding of ethics.

Or perhaps it is being captivated by a picture of liberation. The dream of being free of presuppositions — Fooloso4

But the confirmation lies in embedded in ordinary experience. There is the metaethical argument, the phenomenological reduction argument (reduction to presence, givenness), the argument based on a general materialism, and others.
Being free of presuppositions acknowledged as a given within the context of inquiry into basic questions.

The activities of life. The experiences of life. Being alive. — Fooloso4

But language gives you these utterances. Is there something language gives you that is not language?

Based on what you said about the inability to understand an author, perhaps you have misunderstood his intent. Or do you think authors write without intent? But it looks like you think you understand him better than he understood himself. — Fooloso4

That is not impossible, to understand what someone writes better than they understand it. Kierkegaard admitted as much when he described the knight of faith as someone beyond his own powers to live in faith beyond principle.
I want to say that when we look closely at the process of understanding something, it is one's personal resources that are in play. My ability to draw on my interpretive assets gives me the "intent" and when I see things set well together in a given interpretation, I call this right. My position seems to be that the more ideas lack objective prima facie clarity, the less authorial intent is authoritative.

Right. Seeing is not simply passive reception. What does this have to do with the metaphysics of presence? — Fooloso4

Passive reception is misleading. The real question is, once a typical perceptual encounter has been analytically exhausted in terms of all possible predicative aspects, is there not an existential residuum that remains, and can this be acknowledged a such?

My intent is to understand the author, to resist imposing the understanding I bring to the text when trying to understand the text. It is never a completed task but one that can begin. — Fooloso4

Then I claim you will be disappointed. I suspect the matter goes like this: In trivial matters, like analytic constructions or simple facts like the moonlight being reflected sunlight, agreement is easy, and it is likely there is in my mind a strong analog to what is in my interlocutor's mind as we discuss this or that. This is evidenced by ready agreement and pragmatic contingencies being worked out free of disagreement. I may not have access to the other's world, but agreement makes a compelling case for sameness, and the incidental (yet constitutive if Derrida, or his predecessor, Saussure, have it right) affairs that attend my affirmation would be similar as well. If we talk about numbers succeeding one another, the other's "regionalized" associative matrix about numbers and their sequences would well line up. Agreement here is not absolute, and just because we agree that modus ponens is correct, it doesn't mean we live in parallel worlds on the matter of the terms and their logic. It does mean analogical agreement.
But understanding complex affairs is a very different matter. Interpretations bound with systems of meaning that are only accessible subjectively are brought into play. The first paragraph of, say, Moby Dick, nay, the very concept of being Ishmael, is massively indeterminate in its connotative meanings (to educated readers) in communicative practice. Kierkegaard? The point is that even if you think you've got it, because you've read Plato in the Greek, and the many many dated references, and Hegel and, well, everything Kierkegaard has read, you will still stand outside what K has in mind. Why is K a Christian? Have you experienced his "long nights of dark inwardness"?
I will not say that your effort understand the author is for naught at all, but that in the end, you will have understood mostly yourself and your own advanced understanding.
In philosophy, I never try to understand the intentions of another. That sounds too abstract, good for the classroom perhaps.

Words have definition, but the boundaries, depending on the word, may be more or less elastic. The term 'geist' it can be translated as spirit or mind or ghost, but when Hegel uses the term we are bound to misunderstand him if we intend Casper the friendly ghost. — Fooloso4

Yes. Sounds like the above. But I go much further it seems. I think of Virginia Woolf: A single line spoken, then the dramatic affair is revealed inwardly. Language made public is the tip of an iceberg.

The practice itself is part of your cultural heritage. — Fooloso4

This is a difficult matter for me to discuss. The reduction removes cultural heritage. If taken to its logical and existential end, it is revelatory. And matters like how cultures carry meanings, and how these meanings are constructed differently, fall away. I think getting to this point is the purpose of philosophy.

Language games need to be viewed within a form of life. A form of life included but is not reducible to language. — Fooloso4

Fine. But what is that-which-is-not-reduced?

The later Wittgenstein eschewed theory. Ethics does not require a theoretical foundation. That is exactly the kind of philosophical assumption he wants to overcome. — Fooloso4

Which is why I don't think about Wittgenstein very much. But it is not theory I am interested in. I am with Kierkegaard in that I think there really is this qualitative leap. Kierkegaard confesses he is no knight of faith. Frankly, I don't think he understood himself all that well because his "positing of spirit" is over intellectualized (the curse of genius is you can't keep yourself from endlessly expressing your genius. Addictive). However, his analysis of time in the Concept of Anxiety is eye opening, but did he really understand the eternal present? I think a meditating Buddhist or Hindu just might.

This bolded part is more of that good 'nonsense.' It can't be proved as a theorem, IMV, but it's a gesture, a poem, an aphorism...that tries to get at something. Language is fog with claws. Humans are amusingly sure that their barks are stuffed with mining. Chalk is cheep. — Zugzwang

Language CAN BE a fog with claws. It can also break through ambiguity and uncover essential things. There is a great deal of value in seeing what is NOT the "truth"; such an approach leads to apophatic realization. When a Buddhist sits quietly doing nothing, she is cancelling the world, but in this, the world steps forward that was previously obscured by "fog" of many stripes: family, work, entertainment, and so on. Claws are terrifying, for what is this in light of the discussion before us? It is an awakening to human suffering, but without redemption. Nothing imaginable is more terrifying, but one has to learn to see this.

Sorry for the delay. I am a bit behind on things these days.

Meaning, value, actuality, etc is then attributed as we are embodied in the system. — Possibility

But then: System? An inherently rational concept. Any system you can conceive is structured by the terms and thinking you already possess. The matter here is to take the affairs of philosophy to their threshold, and then not impose more thinking, more metaphysics, but to embrace the indeterminacy. This is liberating.
The only system that services this end is phenomenology and the Husserlian epoche. See his Ideas I.

Wittgenstein explored the dynamic between thinking and logic within a language system, and recognised that just as there is more to the structure or logic of reality than language, there is also more to the quality of ideas (aesthetics) than thinking (within language). What’s missing from his system description is also energy - much like the Tao Te Ching - rendering it only pragmatically meaningful. It’s not just language and its logic, but an embodied, practical awareness of their limitations, that realise meaningfulness in interaction with the world. — Possibility

I would need an example of the Tao to make this clear, that is, this correlation between energy and the Tao. Energy is a science term, connotatively packed, so I don't see how it works well here. Word choice matters a lot. This is why Heidegger had to construct his own, to be free of a long history of bad thinking. I don't think empirical science's "history" clarifies the Tao.

Also on Witt: Logic structures all thought (speaking of the Tractatus here), but it itself cannot be put in this structure to understand what logic is. One would need a third analytical perspective, which would need another to analyze it. There is no way "out" of this, for even the term"out" is nonsense in this context. From whence does logic "come"? What is its generative base? A terrific read along these lines is Eugene Fink's Sixth Meditation. Anyway, it is here philosophy reaches it end. I find the new post Heideggarian theories the right direction. The French I mention above. they don't systematize, but follow the simple logic of the basic principles of phenomenology to their logical conclusions. The result is an encounter with the impossible, which is where we really are.

Not that Kierkegaard thinks like this, but that his system description is rendered complete only in relation to an embodied existence of eternal rationality, a position he necessarily assumes by omitting it from his description. — Possibility

But you sound like Hegel. Read the First chapter of K's Concept of Anxiety. See he is not with this at all. He argues explicitly against it.

The aim of philosophy is to ultimately embody the logical methodology or ideal relation between inner and outer system. If we are to accurately describe this using language and logic, then we need to include in our description, as Wittgenstein and the TTC have done, a purely practical method for embodying an inner/outer relation to the ‘impossible unutterable noumena’ assumed by the description. Without this practice, any understanding of the methodology is incomplete.

From Kierkegaard’s perspective, the assumption is that God already occupies this non-alienated, original condition, and that we merely dance around it. Any embodied relation we may have to this ‘impossible, unutterable noumena’ is subjective, affected and illogical. He relies on Hegel’s description, with its assumption of the open-ended progress of time/energy (a device Heidegger also relies on in his own way), to demonstrate the anxiety of our condition. Without this temporal relation, Kierkegaard’s description lacks directional attention and effort, rendering our condition eternally absurd. — Possibility

How does Witt provide a practical method for embodying inner and outer?? what is inner and what is outer? Time /energy in Heidegger? He doesn't talk like this. As to the embodied relationship, what do you mean by embodied? K is very aware that one has to think and reason to conceive anything at all, but he does not think like a post modern: in the discussion about actuality and reason, actuality is not conceived as a rational noumenon. Love is not rational, nor is suffering, hate, bliss, ecstacy and so on. Reason encounters these, reduces them to its terms, and this is K's objection, developed later by Levinas and others: We conceive of God out of our Totality of reduced world, and in his analysis it is faith that is the leap out of this totality, out of e.g., the principles of ethics, into something entirely irrational.

Do you believe we can talk about pain as an unconditioned term? Pain is a quality, as I described, but alternatively it’s a logical relation between attention and effort, or a motivation to alter relational structure. There’s no one way to interpret pain, but perhaps there is a correct methodology to align our condition with an ideal origin, and in doing so unconditionally understand pain. — Possibility

Yes, in fact I do.You have to look at this phenomenologically, as a metaethical issue. What is the Good? The Bad? Put a lighted match to your finger and wait. Ask then, what is the ontology of this phenomenon? What IS it? This begins the argument.

To me it's more about being aware of how much clarity is possible or appropriate in a given context. The naive metaphysician does a pseudo-math with words without realizing that s/he does not and cannot sufficiently fix/govern the so-called meaning of those signs (hence 'pseudo-math'). From this perspective, one can grok deconstructive/Wittgensteinian critical gestures without losing the ability to write poetry, talk with Mom about God, etc. What does become difficult is to ask blurry questions naively, as if the signs had a clear enough sense for a relatively objective answer. The difference is basically something knowing when one is being a poet and when one is being a mathematician/scientist --which is not to say that this distinction can ever be perfect (this distinction is more of that illuminating nonsense that puts itself in question without erasing itself completely.) — Zugzwang

But then, does this toss the earnest quest for truth at a foundational level into the mix of meaning indeterminacy? I mean, as long as one knows a context well and can move through its language game, does this language play exhaust the content of its possibilities? Or, is there something in the world that is not a language game that issues forth and beckons, something impossibly profound, but the impossibility of it is a measure of the deficit of one's totality of understanding.
This is where some think postmodern thought goes, for in the undoing of confidence in language to seize meaning, there steps forward a resignation that opens up meaning in ways not assimilated by language.
Getting into very interesting thinking: apophatic philosophy.

I am not sure how you get from the duck-rabbit to the metaphysics of presence in a single paragraph. — Fooloso4

The metaphysics of presence is what is denied by your position, and mine mostly, that seeing a duck, and taking up what is before one AS a duck is contextual, contingent, deferential, a thing of parts. The metaphysics of presence takes something to be its own presupposition, with no need to rely on anything but its own presence to affirm that it is.

Culture is more general, context more specific. Within the same culture there are different contexts. How I see the man in a trenchcoat watching children at the playground might be influenced by reports that there is a pedophile in the area. — Fooloso4

I suppose. One could say within the same context there are different cultures. Say the context is murder. Different cultures have different views.

The baby reaction seems to be hardwired. — Fooloso4

One would think. But there are societies where family structures of mother, father, brother sister are very confused by our standard. Hard to say really what an infant would do if natural fixtures like smiling were turned on their head at that age. Marx thought we were utterly malleable, could take on any conditioning, and Skinner thought fathers and mothers were conditioned role playing.

The badness is not presented to us. That seems to be an odd way of talking as if removed from the immediacy of what is happening. A twisted arm hurts. Pain is bad. — Fooloso4

It is the immediacy I have in mind: The pain is immediate, and the twisted arm is incidental. I don't know what pain is, is my point; and I don't know what it is in an extraordinary way: I certainly know the pain, but I can't put the badness of the pain in any totality, that is, context, of usual knowledge, for I can't "see" the badness of the pain. I mean to say, there is something that attends the occasion of pain that is not observable, like a star's light or a mountain's height. the pain exceeds the properties of plain facts.

You made the connection between philosophy and language. What the words might mean to someone
and what he means when he uses the words are not only an important part of it but an essential part. — Fooloso4

But then there is that whole issue about authorial intent. Kierkegaard's intent, of course, is as plain as mine when I read him. But when I read him, it is my "intent" that receives and understands and interprets. Once I take up meaning, meaning is localized. Not that I cannot speak to others about it, for clearly I can, as did Kierkegaard, but the public world is a tip of the iceberg.

Are ideas to be so open that they can mean anything and everything? — Fooloso4

But are they so closed they can only mean one thing? My thought is that single ideas are fluid, indeterminate., yet pragmatically functional. I say, look at the rabbit; you look and we are communicatively satisfied. Yet, the occasion is simplistic. Rabbits in my world share with and differ from yours.

Does this mean that it is not, as you suggested, a matter of suspending one's cultural heritage? — Fooloso4

It means familiarity is suspended, though it is a difficult matter to pin, because when one "does" the phenomenological reduction, all that would otherwise claim the event loses footing. Odd as it sounds, the "presence" of phenomena becomes more deeply manifest.

The transcendental conditions of the Tractatus are not about where you think Kant went wrong. — Fooloso4

No, not exactly. But both draw a line between what can be meaningfully said and what cannot, and the line separates where logic can and cannot go. Where I think Kant went wrong is clear to me. As to Witt's Tractatus, it is, I say, prohibitive of the same, or close to the same (only analysis can tell) kinds of discussion.

Perhaps the assumption of a core question is symptomatic of the problem. The later Wittgenstein does not attempt to ground things theoretically or absolutely. I think it worth considering whether the notion of epistemological 'hinges' in On Certainty finds its correlate in ethical 'hinges'. For example, murder is wrong. So too, the metaphor of the river and the appeal to relativity theory or the absence of an absolute, fixed ground. In other words, the recognition that ethical standards change over time. — Fooloso4

But such things changing over time, the relativity of ethical judgments, these are not the core issues. Not is meaning yielded out of language games. Metaethics is the foundational issue in ethics. Here I refer you to Mackie's Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong for the view I oppose. No wait; that's rude if you haven't read it. I can defend my thinking if you wish to go into it.

I like deconstruction, and in general like what you say here. But does 'ultimate skepticism' keep one from successfully ordering a cup of coffee? Perhaps 'ultimate skepticism' is 'skepticism about the ultimate'? always keeping in mind that the very language that is used here is infinitely deconstructable. Ultimate??? Reality?? What can these mean?. That part speaks to me. I connect it to Wittgenstein. There are thinkers trying to slap us out of our complacency. Not sleepwalkers but sleeptalkers. Babbling inherited strings of tokens, thinking we know what we mean, that it's right there, glowing and whole and present, if we could only spit it out. Along with that the whole sacred fiction of the isolated interior. But, as you say, keeping in mind that the very language that is used here is infinitely deconstructable. Like W calling the TLP 'nonsense.' Even if his view kept evolving or changing, that gesture continues to resonate for me. It's as if the point is to start a fire. No particular phrase need be cast in a starring role. Are we ever liberated from the tyrant? 'History is a nightmare from which I'm trying to awake,' but often it's a game, not a nightmare. Anyway, what is 'escape' or 'freedom' like? Is that another impossible Ultimate? Another vague promise of rounded and fluorescent presence? — Zugzwang

Interesting thoughts, and very close to where I think things go. To me, if a person is not puzzled, if the world is not one big intellectual and existential antagonism, then just put the matter aside and go on your way.

Wittgenstein wanted to slap us out of metaphysics, and this gave rise to a separation of the profound questions that haunt us and the places where philosophy can genuinely go. I never appreciated that, encouraging positivism and its insistence on clarity at the sacrifice of meaning. But he was right in that he brought attention to the place where bad ideas go to die, which is in critical analysis, and when he drew a line between sense and nonsense he made me look regionally, to the areas where sound thinking exists. I think that is very important because it takes one to foundations, which is why when I read Existential thinkers, and postmoderns, I find Wittgenstein everywhere, implicitly, for these guys talk about the "that which cannot be said" but from a distance, lest one fall into the trap of bad metaphysics.

A break with complacency? Yes, and this is Kierkegaard, Hegel, Heidegger, Sartre, Husserl, and so on. In fact, one can say that this one thing is the most salient feature of their thought, because breaking away like this brings one to the world of phenomenology, and this, Kierkegaard tells us, is a qualitative leap (as a disclaimer: one has to put aside the explicitly Christian content. You read K and you discover, Heidegger here, Sartre there; I mean, the famous things they said are lifted from Kierkegaard).

As to the isolated interior: Isolated from what? There are places Witt goes that I do not. But it depends on how this isolation matter is stated.

Calling the TLP nonsense takes one to exactly the place where post moderns like Derrida and post Derridaians elaborate. Witt's nonsense lines up with Derrida's erasure. And this erasure takes one to the very interesting French theological turn toward apophatic philosophy: Jean luc marion, Jean luc Nancy, Michel Henry and others. It is not that they write about nonsense, but that this nonsense, like Kant's noumena, issues analytically (and ultimately existentially) from the sense making that is here before us. Take noumena: Kant said rather grudgingly that we have talk about this because it had to "be" there otherwise representation would be of nothing. But where does the limitation placed on proper talk begin and end about this? He is very much in Witt's corner, with the Dialectics warning us that metaphysics is empty wheels turning, but then telling us that there is this....something out there, which we really can't talk about, being beyond time and space and the categories. But the question is begged: how can one draw a limit on noumena? How can it be all things, yet not there before me, in my computer, my shoes, my cat?

There is only one way to go: it IS there before me, for my phenomenological gaze is thoroughly noumenal, even in the gaze itself. My perceptions of this phenomenological presentation of objects, thoughts and feelings is utterly noumenal. Which is like saying language doesn't work here, but the "here" is right before us, in the perceptual act, and this actually supersedes, cancels even, the regularities of common experience.

That the entire world is deconstructable puts one face to face with the impossible. This Book on the desk is utterly epistemically without a foundation. Not that, a good empirical scientist might say, we are getting closer and our theories are some kind of Hegelian partial apprehension (though Derrida is very Hegelian. Am watching Slovaj Zizek on youtube. He is a staunch if qualified Hegelian and he stated this about Derrida. Never came to me till then. Now I read Phenomenology of Spirit from a whole new perspective), but that language is structurally not capable of foundational truth. But then: we live deep in meaning and caring and all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. What can this be, to live on these terms of engagement, yet to acknowledge the emptiness of understanding. I think a Buddhist might have a clue or two...but she couldn't tell you; or could she? Another issue.

this goes to the isolation you mentioned. One thing one has to do is drop common tongue of interpretation, the endless talk about everything in our everyday lives as the basis for understanding the world. That is isolating, for the more one does this in earnest, the less the world's common interests have a hold, and then, instead of alienation being on the outside of these affairs, these affairs becomes the alienating cause. Eventually culture will come to this, after it is done with pragmatic technology infatuations.

Wittgenstein often made use of imaginary tribes. Suppose there is a tribe that has never seen a duck or a rabbit, but has seen images of what we call a duck and a rabbit. When they look at an image that combines the two their experience would be the same as ours, seeing first the one image and then the other — Fooloso4

Well, not quite the same, for if one grows up in a world where rabbits and ducks have an established presence, and are both brought into poetry, metaphor and irony, and there is a wealth of idiomatic playfulness, and they are witnessed, photographed, etc., then this makes a richer context of meaning. But the richness, the augmentative, and as Kierkegaard would put it, quantitative measure of things really isn't the interesting point, for me. When he talks about the qualitative movement, he refers to what today, by some, is called, pejoratively by Derrida, the metaphysics of presence. Only here does it get philosophically interesting. Here, I claim, really is an encounter with something that "possesses its own presupposition". One has to put away the arguments long enough to actually have such an encounter.

That is another aspect of it. A tribe that knew nothing of Christianity or Christian iconography would not look at a cross and see what Christians do. What we see is to some extent culturally conditioned. In some cases it is more a matter of context. — Fooloso4

I don't see the difference between cultural conditioned and context. The former is certainly the latter. Is the latter not the former? Can context be free of culture? By the time I am mature enough to ask this question, I am already thoroughly embedded.

How we see the look on someone's face: is it a matter of understanding the expression? Babies react differently to smiles and sad faces, smiling in return or becoming upset. Adults may react to the look on someone's face as a smile or a smirk or a sneer. Is the response a matter of understanding? Does how we take it or understanding follow from how we respond or determine how we respond? — Fooloso4

Interesting idea: If those very early years conditioning of a counter intuitive sort, and smiles were signs of disgust, e.g., associated with witnessed adult behavior that was negative and smiling, then the smile would have an altogether different meaning. Such things are not fixed, but contingent. It does seem that physical gestures are as arbitrary as language's signifiers. But what is not arbitrary is the mood, the pain or joy, the value experience, in its presence. Put aside the way language makes a thing sit still and be counted, and observe the presence of, say, love, or ice cream, or having one's arm twisted: What IS this presence?
There is no saying this (though one can refer to it just as much as any other thing) which is why I always thought Wittgenstein right and wrong. The "badness" of a twisted arm is "presented" to us and one cannot talk about pure givenness. (Big argument on this, I know.)

Yes, but arborist does more than classify. The arborist might see the tree and picture how it should be pruned. How the tree is to be pruned is not a matter of linguistic analysis, although such an analysis can be given. — Fooloso4

I guess I agree with this. as long as it understood that language's relation to that which it is about does not relate apart from what the thing yields descriptively, pragmatically, or whatever is there. Language is always about the world. But there is a question begged here: What is language? I believe language is, just like the pruning of a tree, pragmatic. To say it is more than this is to open up what is NOT language. Love is not language, nor is a twisted arm, nor is desire or yearning, the Good or the divine or the horror.

Is there more to philosophy than what is said? — Fooloso4

But what is said? In the saying there is more than what is acknowledged; hence, the question.

Is your question about what Kierkegaard means or about the terms? Whatever it is he might mean it may not be what someone else might mean. — Fooloso4

Is this an important part of it? Take it as a matter of the openness of ideas, which was available to Kierkegaard is ways we obviously share. Then there is my own receptive possibilities, indeterminate, but pressing for understanding. What happens in each of us will never be pinned, and there is a lot of philosophy on this, but the pinning never was about this kind of agreement. Ask better: is what Kierkegaard meant, what Kierkegaard meant? Such questions' analyses throw a wet blanket over all answers. It is, in my thoughts, a red herring that keeps philosophers busy exercising their talents.

For some this is meaningful, although perhaps in different ways. For others, a culturally embedded desire for some kind of transcendence. — Fooloso4

Yes, I know this. But I am unwilling to throw the matter like confetti into the air. I am taken by Husserl's epoche and the French theological thinking that sees an apophatic, theological turn in this. Michel Henry, for example. There is a lot of Kierkegaard in this, and Husserl provides the "method". I think this is where philosophy finds its end, in both sense of the term.

What might this mean? To be more or less than human? To rebel against being human? To attempt to escape being human by leaping away? Therapy or denial? Perhaps the leap is to nowhere. Are such challenging questions part of or antithetical to philosophy? — Fooloso4

This question is literally too big to answer. But then: yes, I think being human, comprising all of the institutions and history and evolved concerns and interests, is inherently something to overcome. I think the essential Buddhism and/or Hinduism right. And philosophy leads only to this.

Not a popular idea at the water cooler in the philosophy department.

There is a difference between maintaining an attitude of something mystical and his rejection of Kant's transcendental conditions. — Fooloso4

Kant's transcendental conditions? Where he went wrong is here: noumena is meant to be all inclusive, subsuming phenomena, just as eternity subsumes finitude; therefore, to say we are bound to the latter and the former is untouchable is a logical error. My cat IS noumenal as it sits here on the couch.
To make sense of this is difficult, however. After all, to "see" a thing AS noumenal--what could this mean? But I don't mean to argue this. It would be like arguing Buddhism. Yes, I am saying there is a revelatory dimension to this.

This is not something I have looked at closely, but I think there is a connection between the rejection of a private language and a rejection of the solipsism of the Tractatus. Ethics for the latter Wittgenstein is not about the solipsistic world of the happy or unhappy man. Ethics is not private. It is about what we do and how we live. — Fooloso4

The latter Witt is not as interesting. I think the private/public discussion not to be close enough to the core question. Why does Witt say in his Lecture that ethical claims are absolutes, value claims absent from the great book of facts. What is it that is absolute? It is value. "In (the world), there is no value, - and if there were, it would be of no value.”
This matter goes to metaethical Good and Bad. I will only discuss it if you are so inclined.

Point taken, but isn't it language that also freaks us out, slaps us awake? And isn't philosophy a social enterprise, offering a subculture's Zeitgeist? I agree that part of its thrill is seeing one's little world from the outside, gazing on it as a relatively amoral and detached alien. — Zugzwang

Of course, you are right about language being both suppressive and enlightening, liberative. To discuss something like this, I think it would require a reading of Heidegger's Being and Time. And Hegel. Hegel holds that language possesses the terms of its own dialectical evolvement, since every affirmation contains the seeds of its own destruction, that is, to affirm X, as an affirmation, is bound up with its own denial because this is not, after all, absolute knowledge: contingencies hover all around, one can question (the piety of thought, the question!). In this questioning, things are torn apart, then resolved. Such is the movement of logic and life. Hegel thought this is all happening in the dialectic between the infinite and infinitude. I actually think he was right, though it is a strange thing to get into.

I like the way you are connected these concepts. One might first say that we are thrown into sin but then decide that having-been-thrown is itself the sin. This is to say that sin is inherited...not through baby talk but as baby talk and all the talk that's grown on top of that baby talk. But, as you say, this only makes sense if culture, any culture, offends or obscures something that precedes it. This I don't find plausible, personally. I suggest we're cyborgs through and through. Wipe away the cultural layer and we're just like the other monkeys with less hair and better fingers. What's more plausible but still difficult to credit is the notion that an inherited culture can be transformed, at least within the individual, into something higher, purer, better. Isn't the 'nonalienated original condition' the old fantasy of the garden before expulsion and consciousness of our nakedness? It can be read as the desire to return to an infantile state. And in many other ways of course. — Zugzwang

Lots of interesting here. First, compare Luther's (there are, of course others. Kierkegaard goes through them in his Concept of Anxiety--a VERY worthy read, if difficult) popular but absurd concept that Adam really pis*** off God, and do what K does: put aside literalism altogether and take the notion as a vehicle to understanding what I consider the most elementary question that a person faces: why are we born to suffer and die? It is just as you put it: "having-been-thrown is itself the sin." Of course sin is a badly connotated word and best off the table; but then again, others have stepped forward, like Heidegger and Husserl, and tried to humanize the concept and in doing so divest it of its deeper underpinning. Our "throwness" is the moral question given to metaphysics, the final recourse once one has exhausted all possible accountability in the world. Science cannot go here at all, for the ethical is foundationally metaethical: what is the Good and the Bad ethically speaking? Put the question to its instantiations: a small child, born into some wretched condition, lives a life of innocence yet suffers constantly, ends up with the black plague and dies a horrible death. Or the like, since such constructions come to me in multitudes, all very real, for they have all happened historically and now over and over.

Anyway, consider sin per the above as the truly profound question of being a person in the world. the affair goes to "invisible" value, the badness of pain is never witnessed. The pain certainly is, but it being bad is not. This badness (not to forget Goodness, what Wittgenstein called divinity) is utterly transcendental. My argument can be more fully spelled out if you care to read a paragraph or two.

So K's sin is not Biblical sin in the popular sense. It has to do the way we are existentially constructed, which K takes as dialectic between body and soul. Now we are talking about souls, eh? to go into this, forget about this term, again heavily connotated. Can't really defend the whole idea without a lot of writing. Suffice to say, the "facts" of the world must include the impossible, eternity. Impossible for obvious reason, but generally speaking, to conceive it at all, one must break logical rules, like, space is necessarily defined by its boundaries; infinite space has none; therefore, infinite space in nonsense. Arguing this here is really not the point. The point is this: that ALL of the assumptions that underlie our affairs of any kind rest on unconfirmable assumptions. That is eternity. Intuitive, logical eternity is a radical impasse to the understanding. And yet, we are not computer programs that have reached a limit, like an absence of ones and zeros. We reach OUT, beyond the ideas and desires, and this beyond is an unyielding "presence".

I better stop here. Stepping over the line, a bit.

As to cyborgs through and through, this biological reduction and being cyborgs I don't understand. As to the infantile nostalgia, yes, of course. But this begs the question, what was THAT?-- in infancy, the question about what it is we are alienated from sustains, for in infancy, we are prior to the pleasure priniciple's sublimation (to borrow from Freud), prior to inherited culture. This IS Adam, and sin's analysis begins here: the infant is thrown into a world free and innocent, only to be tossed around by the world's dreaded contingencies.

Finally, sure, about the monkeys. the "purer, higher, better" fist requires an affirmation that some like this even exists. What is love, joy, happiness, bliss, ecstasy, and so on?

When you look at the picture of the duck-rabbit what do you see? The picture does not change but what you see does. This is not a matter of understanding. — Fooloso4

Isn't it? I don't want to quibble about what the understanding "does" but it seems clear that to "see" a rabbit requires a rabbit concept. It doesn't mean that this concept is explicitly learned or that behind the acknowledging, there is some discursive "rabbit" interpretative process, but that the registering of rabbit in the moment of apprehension requires an underpinning of a language culture that talks about rabbits, what they do and look like and so on. even if one were a feral agency, the concept of rabbit would be an historical necessity to the recognition, concept here being exposure to the phonemes of "rabbit" paired with that fuzzy animal. To understand is more than what the optical part reveals, of course. I thought this was your thinking.

Right, but that contextualization need not be linguistic. The furniture builder and the arborist may see the tree differently. The contextualization is here not a matter of what is said but of what is done. — Fooloso4

Did you say the arborist's contextualization need not be linguistic? This is a scientist whose classificatory speciality is taxonomically complex. How is this not language? Of course, when she reaches for the ax she is not giving a lecture, and these are different matters. But I don't see it as, say, preconceptual, reaching for the ax, for the ax's familiarity is bound up with language in a conceptualized, socialized person.

The difference for me has to do with one thing language does that simply ready to hand cannot do: philosophy. What does it mean for spirit to posit soul and body, as Kierkegaard put it? To suspend one's cultural heritage in a qualitative leap of affirmation of one's existential condition? This is where "therapy" (the OP) is at its finality: to overcome the human condition altogether, if you will.

The early Wittgenstein was explicit in his identification of ethics and aesthetics. In his Lecture on Ethics he refers to his own experience of absolute value. Here again, he connects ethics to what is experienced. For the later Wittgenstein ethics as well as logic are no longer regarded as transcendental but part of a form of life. How one looks at things and what is seen when one changes the way they are looked at remains central. Just as the meaning of words is related to their use, the meaning of ethics is related to what we do, to how we live, to what is meaningful. — Fooloso4

His own experience? But I don't see this in the lecture. I'll read it again. I don't think he ever dropped the religious, mysticality of ethics and aesthetics (in Culture and , not did he explicitly take on ethics. I always read him to be saying that metavalue (Tractatus) cannot be affirmed. Language games never undercuts this, but perhaps you know something I don't.
In Culture and Value he writes, "What is Good is Divine too. That, strangely enough, sums up my ethics.
...... the good lies outside the space of facts. MS 107 196: 15.11.1929
This ws 1929, but I don't think he changed his mind. Added the language games concept, but maintained a healthy distance from putting ethics in theoretical play.

Agreed. By promise I’m referring to Sparky caring about an anticipated event, and trusting in its relation to the sounds we make. You break this trust enough times, and the sounds start to lose their significance for Sparky. I knew a kelpie once who would respond only to her caregiver’s voice. She could also follow hand signals that even contradicted his voice commands (he’d taught her to ‘stay’ beside a pretty girl on the beach while he called her repeatedly - a neat trick). — Possibility

Yeah, that's a good point. Is this trust is a sign of higher intelligence? Or is it mere expectation, not unlike a turtle of a fish "expects" the sun to rise or there to be a provision of other edible things. Am I, in my thoughtless morning opening the refrigerator door and grabbing the milk, just like Sparky?
I think there is a difference is what underlies expectation. In me, there is a complexity attendant to it all, and this is a second order reflectiveness implicit in all prereflective thinking. I seem to read Sartre writing this in the Transcendental Ego.
Dogs cannot think symbolically, nor can they, therefore, think about thinking, experience in a way that is about experiencing.

As to logos and reason, to add some further comments, we moderners have lost the likely animist notion of reason that used to be pervasive with the ancient notion of logos. We nowadays abstract reason as something that (all too often, only elite) sentient beings do in their intents for figure out what is. Whereas, to my best understanding, logos used to address reason as that which in any way determines, or else sets the boundaries or limits of, that which is; e.g., all four of Aristotle’s causes were of themselves reasons for, and, hence, would have been elements of the cosmic reasoning for what is (to the Stoics if none other). What we think of as causation, then, used to be an integral aspect of the logos, i.e. of the cosmic reasoning.

Once so conceptualized, its an easy inference to the conclusion that speaking – the determining of what is, can be, etc., via symbols wherein the being(s) in question produces, or causes, the determining symbols – is itself one aspect of the logos which animates reality. But then so too could be construed a dog’s bark, for instance; the dog’s production of a sound which can symbolize, and serve to determine in others, the dog’s emotive state of mind and associated intentions. At any rate, from this vantage of cosmic reasoning, it can be important to remember that lego, from which logos is derived, can mean “I put in order” and “I choose” in addition to “I say”. Logos then, can be interpreted as the cosmic ordering which chooses what is … and which expresses itself (hence “speaks”) via this ordering. — javra

You know, there is something about this kind of thinking that I find compelling, though not quite as you put it. You and I are, after all, the world, and the logos as any of its expressions is what the world is doing through us, so the ascription of the logos to the world, as what the world is and does, is not an improper anthropomorphism of sorts, as many would claim. I grant, it is hard to make this intuitive connection, because we are all so used to thinking of the world as, as you say, boundaried, we forget that there is some foundational genesis of all that is (See Eugene Fink's Sixth Meditation, e.g.; though here, it is a differently conceived). "Cosmic reasoning" may be pushing it, for I don't think the world of other things, trees, tables and desktops, is apart from language, rationally constructed, and that there is an "ordering" or "choosing" going on in the underpinnings of the world. WE are, however, what the world does and is and cannot be separated, so there certainly is a "becoming" in the world through us, these agencies of rationality and meaning; the world is becoming (but here we run into postmodern concerns I will not bring in)
So, in my sympathy with this kind of thinking, I am talking about logos being IN the world, and not separate from it by the boundaries we impose: clearly we are boundaried thinkers, but we are the world as well. As to our dogs and and other intelligent animals, I am interested in the underpinning of language, whether it is barking or speaking words, which is experience. Dogs experience the world, and in this there is an "innocence" that we should envy, but our intelligence is something we (and hence the world) are doing that is qualitatively unique, something new that our evolving condition manifests. What Sparky cannot do is think explicitly, and cannot separate language from immediate affairs, can't wander off into a corner and wonder. Wonder takes thought to new boundaries as it brings in questions of existence and experience that have no answers, but around such questions there develops a culture inquiry.

How a thing is seen and how it is understood, although related, is not the same. — Fooloso4

I think this needs some clarity. Seen and understood? Are these not synonyms?

mechanic might look at a bunch of parts and see how they are connected. She constructs the object both visually and in practice without the use of language. — Fooloso4

You mean, without the explicit use of language. Of course, I don't talk my way through walking down the street. But then, the ordinary course of my apprehending all that is around me is filled with narrative: I see a tree and "familiarity" of the seeing is not like that of a feral child/person (though, there is an issue about this). It is contextualized beneath the surface event.

Wittgenstein talks a great deal about pain. Toothache is his favorite example. Language does not bring the pain to light. It is an expression of pain. That someone is in pain may be obvious without uttering a word. — Fooloso4

Certainly, but Wittgenstein notoriously refused to talk about ethics because it has this impossible metaethical dimension: the Good and the Bad, not as contingent constructions, but as presuppositionless phenomena. Nothing can be said to penetrate into its meaning. It is not a thing of parts, and I think this is right. But then, it does "speak", unlike, say, the color yellow. The metaethical bad speaks in terms of an injunction: don't bring this into the world!

Not that Kierkegaard thinks like this, but that his system description is rendered complete only in relation to an embodied existence of eternal rationality, a position he necessarily assumes by omitting it from his description. — Possibility

You need to abide by what Kierkegaard says. His descritption is contra Hegel and he is not a rationalist, but insists this rationalality we witness in our affairs, far from being some adumbration of the God's full realization, is altogether other than God. K does not hold that all is foundationally rational and partially grasped by reason in our own zeitgeist. This zietgeist is quantitatively "sinfull" (not int he typical Lutheran sense at all; he flat out rejects this)

The aim of philosophy is to ultimately embody the logical methodology or ideal relation between inner and outer system. If we are to accurately describe this using language and logic, then we need to include in our description, as Wittgenstein and the TTC have done, a purely practical method for embodying an inner/outer relation to the ‘impossible unutterable noumena’ assumed by the description. Without this practice, any understanding of the methodology is incomplete. — Possibility

But there is analysis prior to this "inner/outer" opposition. Remember for Witt there is no "outer" talk is this talk is intended to be outside of logic. Like many phenomenologists, he has this prohibition against making sense out of a world that is not a fact, a "state of affairs". Such things are not in the great book of facts (LEcture on Ethics). Inner and outer are confined to language, whether it be language games or logical constraint. One cannot "talk" outside of a language game. The case I want to make here is that Witt and Kant and Heidegger and others are wrong to think like this, in this prohibitive manner, drawing a line between what can be said and what cannot. "If there is anything better than reason, reason will discover it" I read once, by someone. If one is allowed, and not implicitly barred by cultural norms and their judgments, to look closely at the world's threshold with the Other the meaning of which is not possessed by a restrictive system, like empirical science (which presently cares little presuppositional levels of inquiry), and I am talking What begins with Kierkegaard's Hegel attack in his Anxiety: when he talks about the spirit posited as a synthesis of body and soul he refers to an existential movement which is qualitatively distinct from a Hegelian quantitative movement of reason to reduce the affair to its terms.
You find K very much continued in the post, post modern works that follow through on Husserl's epoche. See Michel Henry on the four principles of phenomenology)
As to the incompleteness, see the epoche, the phenomenological reduction of Husserl. The very idea of such a thing is currently being played out in essays on the concepts of givenness, being, presence, and so on. There is a paradox in this: One the one hand, as Heidegger tells us, there is no philosophical work to do until we are already embedded in a world, like the American world or the Greek world in which language and culture constructs a self fit to self reflect, and break free of the das man. So to be aware at all, one has to first be enslaved (so to speak). BUT: this breaking free is the core issue, not the embeddedness. There is something IN the world that is primordial and profound. Heidegger thought this, but detested metaphysics. He did not see what I want him to see, that I am pushing here: Metaphysics is the radical other of the world, beyond its totalities (of course, Levinas at the bottom of this. See his Totality and Infinity, if you dare).

From Kierkegaard’s perspective, the assumption is that God already occupies this non-alienated, original condition, and that we merely dance around it. Any embodied relation we may have to this ‘impossible, unutterable noumena’ is subjective, affected and illogical. He relies on Hegel’s description, with its assumption of the open-ended progress of time/energy (a device Heidegger also relies on in his own way), to demonstrate the anxiety of our condition. Without this temporal relation, Kierkegaard’s description lacks directional attention and effort, rendering our condition eternally absurd. — Possibility

Dances around, or, "sinfully" at a distance from. Affected, you mean in God's grace" illogical: remember that K will have his knight of faith the grocer down the street. Making the Leap, the movement is a qualitative step out of Hegel's quantitative zeitgeist, is the simple act, really, one K could not achieve, he confesses, of positing spirit, which is born out of existential wonder, then affirmed to be an alienation from God, realizing one's freedom in this, which gives rise to this foundational anxiety in which one can only yield to God to bring about a complete synthesis, which is definitive and eternal. Illogical in that it is NOT a discursive process. We are dealing things that are their own presuppositions (another borrowing from Hegel: something truly foundational has no explanatory priors or reductions). Subjective: Yes, of course. The big crit contra Hegel is this point. This relation to God is individual and the soul is individual and eternal as is its alienation; not some en masse dialectical movement of culture in history.

Open ended progress of time and energy? You use the term energy, but it makes what they say sound like something they didn't say. Heidegger doesn't talk like this. Of course, YOU can talk like this, obviously, and if you want to say that Heidegger really says this, you have to tell me explicitly: You know, Heidegger says this, but consider this using another term. Energy is a science term, and Heidegger would never go there. Regarding Time, his is a phenomenological ontology that deals with the structure of experience (another word he never uses).

Do you believe we can talk about pain as an unconditioned term? Pain is a quality, as I described, but alternatively it’s a logical relation between attention and effort, or a motivation to alter relational structure. There’s no one way to interpret pain, but perhaps there is a correct methodology to align our condition with an ideal origin, and in doing so unconditionally understand pain. — Possibility

Calling pain a quality is like calling it a property. The issue comes in the "calling" at all. Not that we shouldn't call things something, but it takes a "qualitative leap" of a Kierkegaardian nature (putting God on hold) to see that in the calling we reduce it to what it is not. Language does this, reduces the world to something manageable, but what it is (contra Heidegger) is simply metaphysics. We live and breathe in metaphysics. My cat is metaphysics.

There is only one way to understand pain, and that is phenomenologically, through the reduction (Husserl): apply a lighted match to your finger and observe. SImply this. All explanatory theses are off the table and one is to allow the event to "speak". It is a method of apprehending the world that many believe (like K) has extraordinary religious, mysterious (Witt on the "Good"; see his "what is Good is divine, too. That sums up my ethics"; see the Tractatus on this) dimensions.
The area of discussion here is metaethics. We can talk about this if you like.

Again, not that he consciously thinks this, but that his system description automatically assumes a logical embodied position. And logical not within language, but in the sense of a complete (absolute) relation. But I do heed your warning, nonetheless. — Possibility

Okay, I actually lean this way sometimes. But look at Derrida's Margins: affirmations are NOT affirmations. To speak at all is never a singular event, but is a plurality, a diffusion of what is not explicitly spoken, as the number one "defers" to the number two, three, and so on. These literally constitute the affirmative proposition.
Big issue: What remains is the impossible, the Other, the nonliguistic actuality of this lamp on my desk. I may not be able to speak it, but I am IN its presence and th e speaking it does not cancel its otherness.
How is it that I can stand outside of language from a stand point OF language, to make this kind of affirmation? So wonderfully weird. I will spend my days looking at the way Husserl's reduction addresses this.
So here is my case against bringing physics into the deepest level of inquiry: at the deepest level, there is no more discursive redundancies to be brought in, for we are here at the threshold where we are being asked to encounter existence, face to face, if you will. It can be an astounding business if one is intuitively wired for it.

Seeing as is also called seeing an aspect. The best known example is the duck-rabbit. He does not think we first interpret it and then see it one way or the other, we simply see it as a duck or a rabbit.
Further, we can see it first one way and then the other.

Perception is not simple passive reception. There is a connection between perception and conception.

What is at issue is not some visual peculiarity, but the way we look at things and seeing connections. To see connections is not to make connections.

This is a topic that has gained a lot of interest. — Fooloso4

What does one do with the elephant in the room, the "that which is seen" actuality? I mean, seeing as can be understood as taking the object before you "as" such that the qualia or, as Dennett put it, the phenomenon (sense impression sans the concept. See his argument about qualia) is not to be acknowledged at all, for all of the understanding's ability is bound up with the way a thing is taken up. In other words, because language is an essential part of an object's construction, what do we do with the obvious (I say) ability one has to, in the language constructed contextualized event, "understand" the what-is-not a concept as such? There is Kierkegaard's objection to Hegel in this, which is that Hegel talks about, spins arguments about, things as if they were inherently logical, but clearly, the actual is qualitatively different from the language: This pain in my knee is not language, even though language is what brings this pain to "light".

Does thinking take place in the human brain? — Alkis Piskas

Begs the question: Where is a human brain? If thinking "takes place" in it, it must be somewhere, but to be somehere presupposes meaningful spatial designations and these are groundless, every one, in the final determination. AFter all, a concept is only as good as its meaningful, explanatory underpinning. If there is no underpinning, then the concept loses its meaning. A spatial concept like, under the bed presupposes a "where" such that something can be under relative to it. But this "where", it too must be spatially determined, and this in turn the same, and so on. We all know where this goes: eternity, and this is wholly indeterminate.
So, at the level of philosophical assumptions, the "in the human brain" is spatially indeterminate. But this does raise the quesiton of infinity's indeterminacy. Is it? Indeterminate, that is? Why? If it is a quantitative indeterminacy, then there is no indeterminacy at all, for it is easily quantifiably divided. But this is a trivial infinity. Then there is the qualitative infinity, and all things are coextensive spatially; and thought being "in" something loses its meaning.

Are they all that different though? Science informs philosophy and philosophy informs science. I’m not talking about Einstein’s time (and neither is Rovelli, although he starts there), but about what is presupposed. And it’s this presupposition that is explored in the second part of Rovelli’s book. — Possibility

I am saying no to this: Science does not inform philosophy unless you are taking a course in the philosophy of science (which is specialized) and philosophy is not speculative science. This is a popular idea because science is very good at advancing technology. But ask Neil DeGrasse Tyson how it is that a brain can reach beyond itself to apprehend Jupiter or a light wave, and he will simply dismiss the question, or get the answer wrong, grounding it in question begging assumptions. Now analytic philosophy (which wants very much not to be wishy washy and get no respect) with its prioritizing of clarity over meaning does move along with science's emerging theories, but this simply delivers the impression that all is well at the base, while at the base there are glaring absurdities.
Continental philosophy brings light to the foundation of understanding, but, as wheels go, it deals in meaning, and meaning does not make a clear mark of its thought, because at the foundation, things lose their confidence and certainty.
Read the first several pages of Husserl's Ideas I to see where philosophy has its authentic grounding: it is aporia.

I think you’re presuming that I’m deferring to scientific methodology, but this is far from the case. I’m certainly not proposing that we ‘dismiss what is not known’. And I don’t think you can so confidently assume you know what a physicist might say (just how many interpretations of quantum theory are there?) or how all scientists think. I recognise that the terms are often different - but I’m not looking for analysis (and neither is Rovelli in his book), rather coherence. So I don’t seek to understand the primordial or profound as a reduction to ‘something’, but more as the simplest totality of existence.

My recommendation of a book (and your evaluation of its synopsis) is not wholly indicative of my position. The way I see it, Rovelli’s process of deconstructing time as we understand it leads us effectively to Wittgenstein’s eternal present: living in a world without time, consisting of interrelating events (phenomena). — Possibility

Then I would have to read the book. If Rovelli "deconstructs" time, then he dismantles the affirmations of time by revealing its associative "differing and deferring". John Caputo argues in his "Tears of Jaque Derrida" that deconstruction undermines, across the board, knowing's affirmations, and thereby reIeases the world from fixity, from the "totalizing gaze" that says, I know this, I can grasp it, fit it into systems and categories of thought. This can be an intellectual exercise, of course. But Derrida, Wittgenstein and others were very religious. It is a following through of Husserl (see those crazy French post, post moderns, like Michel Henry or Jean luc Marion), that is, existentially religious, like Kierkegaard, whom Witt adored.
I want to defend the idea that is along these lines, that the language that constructs all thought, scientific, philosophical or otherwise, is more than a system that makes logical moves out of confirmable premises. Language constructs reality, such that as one sits and watches the world go by, there is an interpretative construction of the moment that is there IN the observed event. Of course, this is my cat, but there is a more primordial understanding of its Being which is not "being a cat" at all. And this goes for subatomic particles, spectral analyses of star light and so on. One has to look first at the world that gives itself to such affairs. The "originary" world has to be understood at a level prior to, or beneath, the thick body of interpretative history that is the constitutive self that takes on the enterprise of thinking in the first place.
Deconstruction can be loosely talked about, but it should never be considered an affirmation, a positing, regardless of how contradictory this is, and it is of course, contradictory in the extreme.....or is it? I mean, It is not to say one may not affirm this or that, but that such affirmations are never definitive, and all meanings issue from a diffusion of associated ideas. Language is always "under erasure" the moment it is spoken or written.
So deconstruction puts one, Caputo says, in the ultimate skepticism as it annihilates all affirmations. This is where philosophy must go in order to be liberated from the tyrant of language. I affirm that to do so is a revelation, even, as the Buddha said, an apprehension of ultimate reality, though this really does push it, always keeping in mind that the very language that is used here is infinitely deconstructable. Ultimate??? Reality???
What can these mean?

If we do not assume a priori that we know what the order of time is, if we do not, that is, presuppose that it is the linear and universal order that we are accustomed to, Anaximander’s exhortation remains valid: we understand the world by studying change, not by studying things....We understand the world in its becoming, not in its being. — Carlo Rovelli

But of course, there is Heraclitus in this. The world as Becoming; so many are here, from Hegel to Heiedgger. Deconstruction terminates this, not because it is wrong, but because at the level of basic ideas, even "becoming" is no more than a "differing, deferential" term that is self erasing. Derrida's point is the cancelation of all presumption of knowing, of thinking that an idea somehow really has its grounding, even partially. It is not that we are getting closer to the truth with science, but that the truth is just as indeterminate as the concept Zeus or Amitabha and the Pure Land. Only here, with the termination of this presumption can philosophy find its purpose. Liberation.

His more recent book ‘Helgoland’ leads us beyond that point to the relational structure of reality. That he does this from the perspective of quantum physics demonstrates the symmetry at work here. These, for me, are checks and balances to ensure we’re on the right track. But they also suggest that assuming reduction to a singular primordial ‘something’ may be holding us back. Physicists, for the most part, are looking for the source of energy; theologians are looking for the source of quality; while philosophers are looking for the source of logic. The answer, I think, is at the intersection of all three. Where Wittgenstein defers to silence is where we must look to a broader understanding of energy and quality, beyond their logical concepts. Too many philosophers won’t venture here. — Possibility

Yes, this about assuming a singular primordial "something" is right on the mark. But this "broader understanding of energy and quality" raises the same objection: The place philosophers won't venture to go is the annihilation of theory. Derrida's is self annihilating (under erasure) and Wittgenstein's Tractatus talks at length about nonsense, as he confesses in that very work.
I take the matter beyond Derrida, I think, for he spent his days lecturing. He should have spent them liberating his own interiority from the constructions of language that occlude the Real, whatever that is.

Ok, I think I’m (almost) with you now. What you’re describing here - a system structured according to meaning, with affect at the centre and ‘God is Love’ making genuine sense - for me constitutes a six-dimensional qualitative awareness. Your expression of it here is the closest to my understanding of this that I’ve read, so thank you. It is here that I find the triadic relation of energy, quality and logic - not as linguistic concepts but as ideas - also makes the most sense. — Possibility

I can't say I understand "six-dimensional qualitative awareness" or the "triadic relation of energy, quality and logic". I suppose I need to read Rovelli.

In terms of the Kierkegaard use of the term "Eternity" Constance has made reference to, the Moment that is possible to participate in that sense is not the same as the result of stilling the mind or getting the "monkey mind to stop chattering." If time is imagined as a river, that would be letting the current carry one along to find out what not pulling the oars is like. — Valentinus

I would argue that it is exactly the same. Time is not like a river, or, the metaphor is too narrow. Read the Concept of Anxiety on Time: It is the present that subsumes the past and the future. When the knight of faith (Fear and Trembling) proceeds with daily affairs, there is recollection and their is anticipation, but these pass within the boundless eternal present. Now ask, what is it that one does in meditation? I mean essentially, putting aside the endless, and tedious, books that heap upon this simple event so much text and history, what is the matter about?: it is about a termination of the past acting as a totalitarian master over the present. This is the everydayness of living, bound to thoughts that move seamlessly to action, never raising the question that would undo it all. This is exactly what Kierkegaard's argument is in his account of sin, for this undoing opens what is closed, which is the eternal present, which is freedom, eternity, is God, the soul.
It is an existential dialectic (borrowed explicitly from Hegel to counter Hegel. See how here and elsewhere he (Unscientific Postscript, e.g.) puts Hegel under attack, but K's thinking is dialectical: his soul, body, spirit mirrors Hegel's rational schematic. Frankly, I have only been reading Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit recently, and, just as when you read Kierkegaard, you see where Sartre, Heidegger GOT their foundational ideas, so when you read Hegel you see where Kierkegaard got his. K's difference is the application of dialectics to the very personal and intimate relation to God.

With or without "Bible talk", what Kierkegaard is calling for is theological in so far that it tries to locate an individual life in the ultimate conditions of its existence. Up to the point of recognizing the limits of language in carrying out actions, the view is in step with what ↪Banno described as "meaning is doing"

But Kierkegaard still has things to discuss and wants to develop a psychology that understands what it cannot understand. I am not sure how that difference between Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard relates to the philosophy you are calling for. — Valentinus

Meaning is doing? No issue with this at all. But what is doing? A question like this takes language as an interpretative stand in for what ever is really going on. I am advocating a departure from language use, what we receive from our culture at the outset of putting opinions together, as a norm, as what tells us what to believe and how to believe it. One has to step away from normalcy itself, and this is essentially the major Kierkegaardian premise, in order to receive the world in a profound and primordial way. His knight of faith may someone who acts and speaks like an entirely normal person, but the entire edifice of her personality is underwritten by God in the here and now.
God is not Being as opposed to becoming (doing). God is simply what is not possessed by language because language cannot possess actuality.

Dogs seem to have a more qualitative sense of the world. Our verbal expressions are like promises and threats: they have qualitative value, potential and significance for Sparky. They’re not understood (I think this fits better than known) according to objects in spacetime, but according to qualitative relations of embodied experience. When you say ‘let’s go outside’, they understand quality in the ideas you’re expressing: the arrangement of shapes and sounds in “let’s go” have an immediately inviting, inclusive quality to it; while “outside” has a more distant and variable quality related to possible smells, textures and tastes. — Possibility

Threats are very basic, but promises, now that stretches witnessed behavior to a point beyond. What is a promise, essentially? One has to dismiss knowledge of the conditional form, the counter factual: promises are logically complex, for one has to be able to conceive of a broken promise, and here, there is the anticipated event that does not materialize, and there is disappointment. Clearly, anticipation is part of the promising construction, and there is no doubt dogs anticipate, just as mice and lizards do. But broken promises, or fulfilled ones, are not simply about anticipations, about my anticipating another's behavior.
But on the other hand, complexity is implcilty in everything ever said. One cannot understand an affirmation without its opposite, its "binary" associations, and so on.

As to the qualitative relations, of this there is no doubt. In fact, I think this kind of thing really binds a dog's "sense" of the world with ours. Sparky "cares" about his affairs, and this caring is part of the whole experience, intertwined inextricably with reasoned judgment. This is why he has a moral position in the world, for caring is about something of value, and this goes to the Good and Bad of the experience itself. Being scratched in the nose by a cat hurts! Like us, our reason is affectively and valuatively bound.

Very much in agreement here. I like to think of it as there being no metaphysical division between human cognition and that of lesser beings ... only a gradation of magnitude. Principles of thought such as that of identity and of noncontradiction may not be cognized by lesser animals (nor children) but all life makes use of them to the extent that life experiences and then both acts and reacts relative to that experienced. Its hard to properly justify this, though it seems self-evident to me. And this degree of cognition, of course, becomes exponentially greater in adult humans in large part due to our capacity to manipulate symbols to a vastly greater extent, with human language as the prime example, so as to further abstract from more basic concepts. At any rate, enjoyed reading your views.

As an aside, having skimmed through some of this thread, as with Alkis Piskas, I very much equate "the Word" not with human language but with Heraclitus's, and later the Stoic's, notion of logos. Heraclitus's can be confusing, but the Stoics more directly equated the logos to the Anima Mundi, the operative or animating principle of the world. Here, to keep to the previous examples, Sparky is as much of the logos as is his human caregiver ... as is anything that is part of the cosmos. I know, its a more mystical-ish reading of Genesis 1, but "In the beginning was the logos (the Anima Mundi and all it entails)" makes sense to me, whereas "in the beginning was the one linguistic term produced by some omni-this-and-that person" ... not so much. While I get we're not strung up on mythologies: — javra

Regarding Sparky, just a couple more thoughts. You seem to have a lot of respect for what (or "who") he is. I doo, too. But is he is a rational creature? What reason is, is seen only in his behavior, that is, whether he demonstrates reason in actions. Of course, this is the way of it with us as well: I know another's rational interior because of the rational behavior in speech and actions. But then, I look at the "within" of myself to observe first hand my own rationality and it does appear that the symbolic system at work is driven by the simple givenness of logic: I never can observe what logic is because I have to use logic to observe. Logic is always remote in its justificatory validity. So, I do wonder what this dog's interior is like. I think interms of affirmations and negation, yes's and no's, but while his interior cannot "say" these things internally, there is basic aversion and attraction. Nor can he say the conditional form, but he can make associations of causality. How about universal quantifiers? Does rural Sparky know all squirrels hop around in trees? I am sure he does. IN fact I think it can be shown that not just dogs, but all animals possess this capacity for formal, non verbal logic, and this can be witnessed. In the interior of Sparky's mind, however, I

The one philosophical thesis that comes to mind here is pragmatism: In the interior of experience, there is no rational faculty, no reason as such, no logical rules. We call them rules, but this is just a way of categorizing something holistic in its original presence. The entire experience is that out of which reason as a concept is abstracted, but the original whole is some unthinkable aesthetic/reason/sensible/intuitive actuality. And animals have this.

I think the question really comes down to the difference between symbolic representation and this original prelinguistic basis for rationality. This is where philosophy has always taken its cue. This latter is what we share. But this is the foundation for an elevation to higher understanding.

Heraclitus' world? I agree with this. In fact, I am sure that in the argument of Being contra Becoming,....well, there is no Being in this sense. If there is an absolute, it is an eternal becoming. But as to the divine logos, I was listening to a lecture on Hegel and it was stated that Hegel did not believe in a rationality, or logos, as it is currently conceived in this particular frame of historical progress, to be acknowledged as the be all and end all of the logos. We are just a stage of developing an emerging divinity, and this ultimate end is not to be conceived by us, here and now.
But Hegel is not a popular philosopher, nor is Zeno or Marcus Aurelius. Logos is best, in my view, handled by hermeneutics: what we acknowledge as disclosing the world to our understanding is an interpretative order of things. Now, whether this is evolving into some grand finality, is another question. But it is not reason that is front and center; it is value. Metavalue and metaethics. That is, the Good. Wittgenstein thought the Good was divinity.

Well, I don’t assume a singular progression of time as Hegel does, so for me the paradox isn’t between logic and actuality, but between the possibility of an absolute (rather than ‘perfect’) rationality and/or energy source. Is one a ‘beginning’ and the other an ‘end’, a telos? Or perhaps this is a balanced ternary logic (-, 0, +), qualitatively imagined? — Possibility

But why this absolute rationality taking center stage? Rationalism and telos is always a bankrupt idea because reason has no value, that is, a rational perfection refers to form, structure of thought only and carries no weight beyond this. Just an empty vessel, reason. It is only when something in the world is in play that purpose and meaning are brought in. This is why I insist on a qualitative "leap" into a deeper understanding of the world that philosophy can uncover. My tentative claim is that language and its logic is only pragmatically meaningful: its mission, if you will, is to realize value, and this puts the burden of meaning on aesthetics. The Good, Wittgenstein said, is what he calls divinity. He is not talking about contingent goodness, but something profound he thinks is above language. Of course, he was right and wrong about this.

Kierkegaard, on the other hand, assumes a perfectly rational singularity (God), so your jump to ethics in his relation to Hegel makes sense. Everything evolves according to Hegel, so reason in his abstraction cannot realise this eternal rationality (pure reason) that Kierkegaard assumes. Nor can it, in Kierkegaard’s subjective philosophy, ever determine the ethical rationality (practical reason) that Hegel assumes. — Possibility

You would have to tell me why you think K thinks like this. He doesn't hold those things.

Pain has a quality that directs energy away from logic and towards action. It isn’t that it has nothing to do with reason. Rather, we assume an inner logic - an embodied rationality - in order to determine a qualitative (outward) distribution of energy (as attention and effort). The way I see it, reason ranges qualitatively from pure logic to pure energy. — Possibility

This is why one has to, if the interest is in getting to the real foundation of what being a human being is about, look to what is prior to this kind of talk. Of course, not historically prior, but logically prior, something prior because it is assumed, and sits invisibly, because uninquired, at the base of all inquiry and discussion: always, already in the presuppositions of anything that can be brought up for theory and discussion. I'm talking about the foundational place of language to the world. I have been arguing that beneath anything we say there is the impossible unutterable noumena which is not outside of experience at all. Phenomena are actually noumenal entities. But what makes something noumenal? It is not that it is beyond language, but rather, only beyond language in its, to speak Hegelese, Zeitgeist, which actually reflects Kierkegaard's concept of sin. Sin (but put aside the Christian thinking here) is essentially being possessed by culture, but the manner of conceiving of sin is important: It is an existential break from something primordial. Heidegger will later dismiss K's religiousness, but move forward with this "break" saying K is right, we in our normal assimilated ways of living according to "the they" which is the thoughts that circulate so freely and dominate throughout society in the form of given institutions and ideas, are out of touch with something deeply important. He thinks there is some nonalienated original condition.
Thus, pain is, prior to being taken up in science, in evolutionary theory, in talk about energy, or "moving away from logic toward action," I am saying, given to us as a conditioned term, blunted by language's tendency bring all things down to a familiar level (they they, or das man, as Heideggger puts it). Language makes us forget, reduces the world to familar terms. We don't think this is so because we are IN this zeitgeist, and it takes philosophy to see it.

This is where philosophy has to take us if it wants foundational meanings to appear. And there is no where else philosophy wants to go.

This dualism of inner in relation to outer system is unavoidable, but the structure is highly variable. Kierkegaard’s system logically assumes God in order to describe subjectivity: qualitative judgements of affected experience. Hegel’s embodied system, on the other hand, assumes an unlimited process or source of energy (the progress of history) to describe a dialectic: manifesting past experiences of logical contradiction. With Hegel, it seems there can be no synthesis without a process of dissolving identification (thesis/antithesis), from which we then reconstruct history as a new dialectic develops. — Possibility

One has to be careful with Kierkegaard, making him sound like a rationalist. It is not that he thinks God is logically assumed, but that God is conceived as an actuality that is intimated in childhood, and realized (bringing in sin by this) later as an incompleteness that is evidenced by the calling, the existential anxiety which is realized int eh fateful moment when a person reaches self awareness and affirms this incompleteness in her existence. It is an existential dialectic, not a logical one. Of course, Hegel never thought empty logic was of any value, but to say "the real is rational" affirms God's rationality, and K will have nothing to do with this. My take on K has reason trying to deal with something entirely outside of reason because reason attempts to embody, encompass, "totalize" the world by bringing all things to heel.

I think you're right about Kierkegaard and Hegel, essentially.

Do you mean by this “knowledge by acquaintance of abstract ideas” or “propositional knowledge”. I of course agree they don’t have the latter. But, in the example I linked to, to categorize items by function and by shape demonstrates an acquaintance with abstract ideas, i.e. the awareness of concepts. Outside and inside are themselves abstract ideas addressing a relation between an enclosed space affixed to a relatively opened space and the directionality between these. But I think the example I linked to carries more weight. I by examples such as this conclude that language is not necessary for the apprehension of concepts. — javra

Or perhaps better: Language as we know it in our complex symbolic dealings in logic and math, is not qualitatively distinct from what Sparky does when retrieving toys and such. That is, when I do modus ponens, an analogous structure can be found in Sparky's mind as he singles out circles from other things. Consider a pragmatist's theory of knowledge: it is the conditional structure that is truly at the foundation of knowldge about the world, or anything else. IF I hear, see this noise, these squiggles on paper, THEN something occurs with regularity. What is nitro glycerin? The answer goes to its forward looking meaning: IF X impacts a surface of resistance Y, in a given quantity and velocity, and IF X has certain properties (all analytically reducible to if...then...epistemic terms), then X is nitro. Properties? How does one "know" a property? Through its association with a symbolic designation, like a noise (signifier), such that IF I observe properties P (that furry moving organic thing), signifier S (a phonemic noise like 'dog') "works" to carry meaning.

Anyway, I do think our complex symbolic systems are essentially pragmatic, like a dog's relatively simple "cognition". And when the dog responds to spoken words, it shows basic conditional thinking. When you say he is aware of concepts, I think this means he is pragmatically aware, and this is true of all animals, that is, aware that some X follows from some P. To say this is Pavlovian is not to diminish what he does. We are Pavlovian, too.

Interesting: language, Derrida says, is a symbolic "standing in" for something else, separating thought from the what thought is supposed to be about. I think Sparky's training is the first step toward the creation of an internal world, set apart from things.

Just some musings really.

How then do you explain a dog's ability to recognize the names of 1022 items, replete with a capacity to "categorize them according to function and shape"? Less extraordinary, border collies are notorious for knowing such things as their left from their right in herding sheep per the instructions of their caregiver. All this requires a good deal of conceptual contextualization regarding what sounds symbolize - with no language production on their part.

Heck, my own dog recognizes the difference between "go inside" and "go outside", be this the house, a specific room, or the car. A very abstract idea that is very relative to context. And this without any formal training; hence, no formal punishment and reward. — javra

You know, that is a very good point. So a well trained dog cannot, I think we can agree, produce an internal dialog. Sparky can't think, "Well, Jane is sleeping and I wish she would get up and put some food in the bowl. It was the same last week, I mean why own a dog if you're not going to......" There is no concept of time and space, no prepositional constructions, no conditional, negations that can be explicitly spoken internally. But: they do have familiarity that reaches conscious awareness; but then again, do they? When you say, "Let's go outside" does outside mean outside, or is it just a Pavlovian reaction? Of course, they feel good in this activity, bad in that one and they do make the connection between verbal noises and activities, they can anticipate. But is this knowledge?
Depends on what you mean by the term, of course. We say Sparky knows this and that, but we are being loose with this epistemic term. Safe to say, Sparky has no conceptual knowledge. But perhaps he has, and I suspect this si true, some kind of proto linguistic grasp of things. We have the conditional propositional form, and Sparky certainly follows events following other events.

The matter of agency in The Concept of Anxiety requires the Single Individual to become responsible for what happens that thrusts them into the immediacy of their decisions as actual events.
The encounter is outside the bounds of the psychology we use to understand experience. — Valentinus

Yes. The freedom one experiences requires a transformation of elevated consciousness, which brings sin into the world, for prior to the positing of spirit, one is not capable of sin. Of course, K rejects the rather common Lutheran notion of original sin as some horrible, unspeakable transgression committed by Adam (see the Smallcald articles that K refers to). He gives an existential, that is, phenomenologically descriptive account of why it is we are born to suffer and die. It is rooted in Augustine: it is our alienation from God, the absence of God in our affairs, and this absence is there, in the analysis of time, for to be more this world's than God's is exactly what it is to devoted to culture and its indulgences, which are inherited and possessed in recollection, what K thought "Christendom" encouraged.

Kierkegaard can be, of course, off putting with his Bible talk, but The Concept of Anxiety is a cornerstone of existential thought in its temporal analysis of freedom. It altogether bypasses the principle of sufficient cause as a refutation to freedom.What I want to say is that when I stand before my future in full sight of my possibilities, I stand apart of what would spontaneously set me to action, and in this no cause possesses me. Now this crossroads of will and sufficient cause cannot conclude in a violation of causality, because this principle is intuitively inviolable. But as I see it, this is not the point. The point is, when you make this qualitative leap from spontaneous action to deliberative action at the philosophical level, where the totality of existence is brought to a stand still, that is, you stand not simply before this or that possibility in some categorical determination, but before all possibilities, before Being itself, you suspend all that makes this world the familiar place that it is, and Inquiry has no possibiities before it, for there is only the eternal present, free of decision making. K calls the one can do this a knight of faith. For me, it is an extraordinary event, to stand before Being as such and make the world stand still. This is where philosophy is supposed to take us.

This should sound familiar, because it is something Eastern mysticism has been talking about for centuries.

My dog definitely understands "no." — Hanover

A thought: no, your dog does not understand "no". Understanding what another says means there is agreement between both parties, and a dog's received meaning has no conceptual contextualization. Humans say this word, and the prohibition is wrapped a body of associated thought. Not so with Rover. Rovers "no" does not register symbolically because she has no language. She does have, you could argue, associated experiences that make the "no" familiar and is conditionally connected to punishment and reward, the same as us. But "to understand" the word, well, dogs don't have words.

↪Valentinus Seems to me to be the same point. All talk occurs within language games; all language games are embed in -constitute - the world, what can be said. Constance is puzzling over ways to talk about the world without using language. You can't. But you might act in the world - do something; paint a picture, demonstrate a kindness, make a sacrifice. — Banno

Just to make clear: the rabbit out of the hat is not a world without language, but a world through language making itself and its alinguistic content appear. Language is the house of Being (a great philosopher once said), but as language brings being to light, there is that-which-is-being-brought-to-light. We receive this in interpretative language, but language does not have fixity in this; it is malleable, expendable, not rigid or dogmatic because the world holds it there. Language is open. I am saying in this openness, the question (the piety of thought), the second order reflection, inserts an aporia, and here one is freedom. Now, freedom to do, to see what? that is the question.

What proposition, exactly? — Banno

"I am tasting an oyster," for one. There is, in this event, a great deal of language involved, though it is not explicitly exercised in the actual tasting event. When I walk out in the morning and see all around me as familiar, the trees and hills, etc., if I were, say, a feral child all grown up sitting on a limb like Tarzan, things would still be familiar, and I might even be able to wonder existentially in some simple way, but how far could this go having no schooling, no language modelled around me giving definition to things? It is language articulates the world in symbols and makes inquiry and logic accessible. Language is the essence of thought itself. I imagine Tarzan would be more like a beast of the jungle than a king.

So, as I taste something, I know I am tasting it, and the tasting event emerges out of a matrix of language that has already established a working understanding. Right there, behind the tasting, if you will, there are "regions" of language possibilities waiting for context to "speak" that is, give meaning to, the occasion.

So you are saying that the cat being on the mat is one thing, the proposition "the cat is on the mat", a different thing? And yet "the cat is on the mat" is true only if the cat is on the mat.

Of course the world is always, already interpreted. Your reaching for, talk of, an uninterpreted world is a conceptual mistake. — Banno

No, I'm not saying that either. I am saying something that is frankly radical, but true. Observe the cat. In this observation there is a conceptual counterpart to the "presence" of what is there, and by presence I refer to what is not spoken, or speakable. Moore called ethics a matter, at the level of metaethics, of a non natural property. He was referring to, if you will, the qualia of pain and pleasure (and internal prohibition and valuation) Think, as Kierkegaard did, of the actuality over there on the sofa like this: in the broadest sense, it is an actuality that is qualitatively NOT a cognitive presence as an actuality. We, says Wittgenstein, bring meaning (and ethics and aesthetics) into the world, and take up the whatever it is there on t he couch as a cat, that way we can anticipate it when we see it, "know" about its possibilities, etc. This is what a thought is, a forward looking apprehension. BUT: the moment of apprehension is seized by knowledge in the forward looking event. If knowledge, this forward looking affair, can be put down, like a Buddhist or a Hindu puts down experience in deep meditation, or, via jnana yoga (philosophy), the world becomes a revelation--something altogether new comes to light.

It is a conceptual mistake, and I agree, as do many others, but it is not an existential mistake. This goes right to the point: conceptual mistakes belong to a body of judgment and error that is deliberately being opposed. The argument speaks for itself, but the "soundness" depends on the world and the way it presents itself. These concepts we are supposed to abide by come to us with foundational biases that have to be identified. Deconstruction, e.g., is part of this.

I really wonder why haven't they translated the Greek quote at least as "In the beginning was the Reason" ... This would have saved us a lot of time in discussing it! — Alkis Piskas

Take a look at my later comments. I try to go more into the issues you raise. ) I wrote them this morning not having read this post of yours here.)

So you want to do philosophy of language, but vaguely back it up and give it a sense of authority with references to the Bible (and other assorted scriptures)? — baker

This about the Bible: I have a lot of respect for what you could call primitive authentic experience. Ideas so full of nonsense, yet they are closer to the foundation of something deeply important.
Authority with references to the Bible? Really, it's the other way around: philosophy brings analytic clarity to obscure thinking. What kind of authority did you have in mind?

What else could it be?
Definition of "speech" by Oxford LEXICO: "The expression of or the ability to express thoughts and feelings by articulate sounds." Aren't sounds material? — Alkis Piskas

But is a concept material? But then, what do I mean by material? Material is at the basic level supposed be the most inclusive term, including pots and pans and abstract thought in mathematics. The idea is that there is this ontology that concludes all of this, but the problem is that there are obvious apparent differences and a term like material is borrowed from the pots and pans contexts of use and extended to include all things? Sure, saying a word, using lips and larynx and the rest is material, as a classificatory term, but ideas, logic, language and meaning, and so forth, these do not fit the category, and for obvious reasons. We want to say all things are one, perhaps, but this one is not materiality, because this would be a violation of the boundaries of the appearances upon which out concepts are drawn. My pen is material, but a thought? It has no feel to is, no weight, no visibility and so on. But these are the defining marks of material, are they?

No, I din't say that. I only said the "Word" ("logos") as "speech" doesn't make sense in ths famous Christian quote and I just tried to give a better explanation by considering the meaning that word "logos" acquired with time, and that was "reason" ("logiki"). This is much more plausible since reason is beyond any borders imposed by languages (speech), religions and civilizations. And this because its nature is mental, spiritual and not material. The expression "conscious thought" which you are using is very close to it. The word "Consciousness" that I used, is also very closely connected to "Thought". — Alkis Piskas

I see. So instead of "in the beginning the was the word" is should be "there was reason"; but I thought you had an objection due to words not being sufficiently liberated from the vulgarity of physicality, as if God had vocal chords. Anyway, I would certainly agree that God is not like a person vocalizing the world into existence. It's just that the word 'word' I never took to be this physical event. I equate word with a meaning and its logic. Instead of logos, which sounds more like a reference to principles and laws of logic that are universal, I look at meaning, which is inclusive of affect as well as cognition. This is the original affair that sits before me prior to the analytical separation. There is no separation in base line experience: I think, feel, concern, care all in the single event. Analysis reveals what it is, the what is it does not thereby become a body of analytical pasts. It remains whole. (This is one way to talk about a complaint against rationalism existentialists have.).
Consciousness, I agree, is closely connected to thought. But more that this: it IS thought. I tend to think like this: When we talk about consciousness, it is an ontological matter, as consciousness Is the ISness of my egoic presence, call it a transcendental ego. But to talk about this sans thought, reflection, reason, affect, mood, and so on, is to reduce consciousness to a pot or a pan or a star cluster, a mere presence before my eyes sort of thing. But clearly consciuosness never comes before one's eyes, so this classification is simply off the table. And since our notion of things are evidenced only by the way they appear, and consciousness never makes an appearance (like this) it is entirely wrong minded to infer from object appearance's concept of Being or Reality, to that if a consciousness.

Yet, as plausible as this "version" may be, I cannot claim anything more about it, since I have not has any realization about Consciousness being "the beginning of all things" as you say. A lot of thinkers calim or believe that, though. — Alkis Piskas

The beginning of all things in my thinking here has to do not with some temporal order, but outside ot a temporal order, in the here and now. How is this possible? It gets very weird, frankly. One has to make a critical step out of familiar thinking. But look: putting all texts in abeyance, at least explicitly, observe the world before you, and there are tables, chairs, a computer and so on. My view (constructed out of readings) begins with the question what is it that lies before me? And, how do I know these things? Ontology and epistemology. I know them in time, or better, they are constructed or made out of time, for these are presented to me as events in which memory is called up to identify. Thus, this present is made of the past, to put it bluntly. But I am trying to acknowledge the present thing there before me, so how do I get to the present when the past is the very essence of "knowing" it is there at all?

Such is the dilemma. I claim that the "metaphysics of the present" is a real possiblity. This claim goes against most others. They are mistaken. They don't indulge the aesthetics of the real enough; such is the bane of the intellectual philosopher, so busy constructing thought, it isn't meaningful to think that the point is to dismantle thought. How does one dismantle thought? This is philosophy's job: make the eternal present a real event by undercutting memory's hold on the present via inquiry at the level of basic assumptions.

Some games invoke the modification of their own rules. That's not necessarily a termination. — Banno

True, and such it is with being a person. To put it in Rorty's terms, vocabularies are open, waiting to be recast. But again, I say, much in opposition of Rorty and others, not that there is a final vocabulary (bad metaphysics) there are higher vocabularies, and I don't mean just higher as more inclusive; I mean more profound, and yes, that there is such a thing as what you could call existential profundity. It is why religion is so full of cliches like "the power and the glory"--a lot of metaphysical hogwash, but mixed with something else that is certainly not howash.

Interesting that you read ‘an infinite source of energy’ as ‘eternity’. The finitude/infinity of energy is the paradoxical quality of time, and the qualitative flow of energy is time’s directional logic. Have you read Rovelli’s ‘The Order of Time’? — Possibility

But the issue here has nothing to do with Rovelli or physics. Philosophy is not physics, nor is it abstract speculation. Think of eternity, for example, but withdraw from assumptions that are in place in the everydayness of affairs (of which science is an extension) and move into a more basic analysis, which is the structure of experience itself. The issue of time is fundamentally different, for time at this level is what is presupposed in talk about Einstein's time. Has nothing to do with physicists being wring and phenomenologists right; rather, these are modes of inquiry radically different from one another.

Yes, there is not just this possible prediction, but also its negation - the impossibility of it all. You’re presuming a ‘perceptual event’ has form: a definable quality to be changed. But any perceptual event is qualitatively variable in itself - it manifests variable observation events according to a predictive relation, but it’s also variably perceivable as such. So it isn’t so much change as a vague awareness of variability - on the periphery of any capacity for perception. That either draws attention and effort (affect), or not. It’s not undeniable - it comes down to an availability of energ — Possibility

Where you go wrong here is in "vague awareness of variability". One has to pull away from any particular categories of disciplined thinking, whether it is be science of knitting, and withdraw one's attention altogether. Of course, this kind act is usually cognitive, and here, in the idea I am defending, this is true as well, as it is a movement from the particular to the general. E.g., I withdraw from one taxonomic classification to a higher one, and there is no qualitative existential change, only different vocabularies come into to play while others dismissed. Look at the entire enterprise of thought this way, and while certainly qualitative changes are there, in the practice, in the subject matter, after all, biology is not pottery, but the understanding remains steady in the familiar way of things, and when some Kuhnsian paradigm shift does occur, it is MOSTLY assimilative, having to make revolutionary changes out of the normal science's established systems. Where does Quantum physics get its terminology? It is borrowed from existing vocabulary, and modified using metaphorical extensions. The new is always an assimilation of an existing totality (to borrow a term form Levinas, Heidegger, et al).
This provides a working concept to proceed here: Philosophy, I am claiming, is where thought goes when the world exceeds all paradigmatic categories. Heidegger wrote Being and Time just to go here, to the place where thinking meets its terminal point and explanations run out. But (and this is a crucial idea) instead of thinking like a scientist and dismiss what is not known as something always coming, waiting to but constructed conceptually, theoretically, which is an essential part of Heidegger, where Heidegger looks for some primordial language that has been occluded by centuries of bad metaphysics, I claim the reduction to something primordial and profound lies in Wittgenstein;s eternal present. Put Rovelli aside, pick up Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety.

Again, NOT at all that Rovelli (I read a synopsis) is in any way wrong, but the terms of analysis are very different. Time, its past, present and future, are here features of the experience that is already in place antecedent to what a physicist might say. (Einstein knew this. He read Kant when very young. He just knew he wasn't going to take on philosophical issues).

My point here is that at this intersection we must embody energy, logic, quality, or some combination, in order to relate to anything at all. You agree that any quest for an unlimited source of energy is one of identity: it assumes that everything has a proper, definitive relation to everything else, and if we somehow manage to complete this process of identification, then the source must reveal itself. It’s an issue for ethics because to do this we assume that our perspective embodies a proper, definitive relation to everything else. — Possibility

Yes and no. No, because this definitive relation is never definitive. All of our concepts are open, evidenced by what happens when you chase down meanings, which is what deconstructionists do, and can sound childlike doing it: What is a bank teller? What is money? What is economics, and so on, and so on. Then, what is a person? What is this, that, and questions are not simply playful antagomisms, but are indicative of the indeterminacy of language (something Willard Quine famously wrote about; and he hated deconstruction...while agreeing!) Concepts are, all of them, open. So what happens, I ask here, when the broadest concept imaginable, Being, stands in openness? THIS is an extraordinary event, to allow the entire conceptual edifice to be "suspended". My claim is that if this is done faithfully, allowing openness its full due, then the world qualitatively changes, for there is no longer any conceptual recourse, no body language into which one can retreat, no "totality" that can subsume all things, for one has breached into eternity.

Energy? Why not shakti, or Brahman? Or thathata? Of course, these terms have different meanings, all of them, but note something important: When Hindus and Buddhists use vocabulary like this, they are understanding the world as it appears, mixed with thought and affect; cognition is not separated from these and objects in the world. How does one privilege ideas in a system like this? According to meaning, and affect is no longer a marginalized phenomenon. It takes center stage in ontology. And saying something like God is Love no longer is just a romantic foolishness.