It is much nearer to a pure potentiality, the way things are likely to form — Wayfarer

Doesn't Aristotle conceive of matter as potency and form as act, though?

Doesn't Aristotle conceive of matter as potency and form as act, though? — Thorongil

As I understand it, it's rather like (no coincidence) Heidegger's distinction between 'present-at-hand' and 'ready-to-hand'. Matter has potential, dynamis; form is actuality, energeia or entelechia.

I am a simple nominalist about universals. We are universalising creatures, and such universalising is indeed the only way we could make sense of events and objects. To differentiate is to deny identity; and then to quantify over properties is to universalise, from redness to sparrows. — mcdoodle

But sparrows and redness are names of qualities. So how did you get from quantification to that?

It would make more sense to say that we are differentiating creatures and then generality or quality arises in the limit where differences no longer make a difference to what we are talking about. A sparrow is still a sparrow if it red or blue, plastic or flesh, fat or thin.

So universals - as ideas, conceptions, qualities or the many other terms we have to denote bounding constraints - are not merely merological composites of all their possible instances. They stand just as firmly as the ground to acts of differentiation. For differences to make a difference pre-supposes the simpler state of differences that don't change a state of affairs.

I believe nominalism claims that those things which particulars have in common are not independent of those particulars. There is no such thing as roundness in the absence of a round object. — Michael

Again, the real point is that the realist-nominalist debate is founded on a metaphysical dichotomy. And so the resolution lies not in an eternal battle to decide which is the real, which is the epiphenomenal. Being a dichotomy, each requires the reality of the other to be real itself.

So there can be no particularity without generality. And vice versa. You need a symmetry to have a breaking. And the breaking is what reveals there was a symmetry.

The problem with universals and Platonic ideas is that they are not generally understood in a hierarchical fashion. So roundness and sparrows and teacups are all names for individuated ideals. Platonia quickly fills up with a bestiary of perfect representatives of classes.

Nominalism is right on that score. We humans freely name abstractions without really being systematic about the formal and final causality that the names mean to refer to.

But reality is organised hierarchically. So teacups are ideals that have their formal and final cause very locally within the sphere of human culture. And sparrows likewise are the product of very local biological and ecological constraints - the symmetry breaking information to be found in a genetic and ecological developmental history.

So if we are talking about the truly universal, we are talking about the cosmologically fundamental. And roundness becomes a good example of that.

The reason for roundness is rotational symmetry. Along with translational symmetry, it is simply one of the basic facts of their being spacetime. And it is a universal in the fashion I specify - a difference that doesn't make a difference. To spin on the spot is inertial. Rotation freely happens because it makes no difference.

So roundness becomes the name we give in recognition our (geometric) reality has this fundamental boundary property. A circle is a representation of the symmetry which is an unbreachable limit - you can't get more round than this roundest thing. The circle embodies the difference that doesn't make a difference because it could be spinning madly, it could be standing still, and you couldn't see any change.

And then from that state of cosmic Platonic perfection, even the slightest deviation becomes the symmetry breaking, the difference that makes a difference. Mark the circle with the tiniest dot and now it's state of motion is made a counterfactually definite thing.

So the whole realist-nominalist debate is a result of the usual wrong turn when faced with a metaphysical strength dichotomy or symmetry breaking.

The way to make sense of an apparently fundamental opposition is to step back to the triadic or hierarchically organised point of view where you instead see how it is a case of two complementary principles in mutually formative interaction. Each extreme is making its other in a mutualised symmetry breaking.

Wayfarer should recognise this as Budhist dependent co-arising even if he doesn't get the more advanced formulations of systems science and Peircean semiotics.

The Ideas are not in space and time, and so are not causally efficacious. — Thorongil

I think you're actually advocating a subtle dualism here, though - 'ideas' being in a 'mental realm' which is causally inactive, i.e. can't effect changes, and the 'objective domain', which you presume is the really existent domain.

But recall the Kantian insight that reality is not simply given to us, we're not passive spectators of an already-existing vista. The mind orders and constructs according to judgements and the categories of the understanding. In that context, universals are not simply psychological constructs, but an aspect of what brings order to experience, the lineaments of reality, inasmuch as 'reality' is an aspect of experience.

So on a deep level, it's not as if mind and ideas are in a separate domain, they're not 'in here', as opposed to what is objectively given. Mind and ideas are constitutive of reality in a way which I contend we have now generally lost sight of, due to the 'habit of objectification'. (Prothero had a good thread on PF about Whitehead's views 'bifurcation of nature').

I think you're actually advocating a subtle dualism here, though - 'ideas' being in a 'mental realm' which is causally inactive, i.e. can't effect changes, and the 'objective domain', which you presume is the really existent domain. — Wayfarer

The scare quotes can only impute metaphorical dualism to my position, not the real (Cartesian) thing. And objects exist just as much as the Ideas. I propose no chain of being whereby some things can exist "more" than other things.

But recall the Kantian insight that reality is not simply given to us, we're not passive spectators of an already-existing vista. The mind orders and constructs according to judgements and the categories of the understanding. — Wayfarer

Yes and no. Reality is actually given to us, according to Kant, it's just filtered by the forms of understanding. So the product of the filter is constructed, not reality, though the filtered construction then becomes reality for us.

Have you looked into Whitehead? His metaphysics seems like a good vehicle to concretize Schopenhauer's Will.

Far from moot, that's the very equivocation with states of consciousness I'm criticising. The separation between states means that not all them are actual experience, despite them always being experiential (having meaning in experience).

Everything is not experiential (an actual experience) in the sense Whitehead talks about. Nature is, to reference Prothero's thread, bifurcated all the way down (and up, and around, and throughout). Experiences are not the things they are experiences of. Every object (including each instance of experience) is it's own state distinct from everything else. Bifurcation of nature is not contrary to relations, process and becoming, but rather how they are all expressed. Everything is its own thing, yet also in relation with everything else and always becoming.

Not in any great depth. I remember long ago looking into him and not liking or agreeing with what I found. I've ignored him ever since.

In taking the following position Kant doesn't.

Yes and no. Reality is actually given to us, according to Kant, it's just filtered by the forms of understanding. So the filter is constructed, not reality, though the filter then becomes reality for us." — "Thorongil

He's still treating as if the is an "unfiltered" reality out there we can never access. What we filter is still mistakenly understood as a "flawed picture" rather than understanding of the world wider than ourselves. More critically, he still treats the "unknown" as if it is outside our filter. But this cannot be true . Since any unknown state if in relation to us, it must be within the filter, be something we might know.

The filter must be reality. Everything must have an understandable form regardless of whether anyone knows about it-- that's why there is an unknown state. There can be no reality to know beyond how things might be filtered to experience.

He's still treating as if the is an "unfiltered" reality out there we can never access. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Yes, the thing-in-itself.

What we filter is still mistakenly understood as a "flawed picture" rather than understanding of the world wider than ourselves. — TheWillowOfDarkness

I have no idea what you're talking about here.

More critically, he still treats the "unknown" as if it is outside our filter. — TheWillowOfDarkness

The thing-in-itself? Yes, because it is outside the filter.

But this cannot be true . Since any unknown state if in relation to us, it must be within the filter, be something we might know. — TheWillowOfDarkness

This is a non-sequitur.

The filter must be reality. — TheWillowOfDarkness

It is. For us.

Everything must have an understandable from regardless of whether anyone knows about it-- that's why there is an unknown state. There can be no reality to know beyond how things might be filtered to experience. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Kant would agree with this.

I propose no chain of being whereby some things can exist "more" than other things. — Thorongil

I'm convinced there is a reality behind the great chain of being, the loss of which is basic to this discussion and to the subsequent 'flatland' of empiricism.

Is that a comment or a rebuttal? I'm no fan of empiricism qua empiricism either.

As a follow up, your question also reminds me that for some time I've had the thought that Aristotle may prove useful in further clarifying and possibly widening Schopenhauer's metaphysics. I wrote some brief notes to myself on it a while ago and can share them with you if you want.

I think that there are degrees of reality, reflected in the Platonic epistemology. So the original intuition was that the philosopher, by dint of being able to perceive the underlying causes or reasons for why things are the way they are, had insight into that underlying or over-arching order. But that was very much what was lost in the transition to modernity, via the rejection of universals by the nominalists, as universals are part of that structure.

I think that there are degrees of reality — Wayfarer

Okay, but the word reality is not the same as existence. I'm fine with degrees of reality, but not degrees of existence. The latter is nonsensical to me.

But that was very much what was lost in the transition to modernity, via the rejection of universals by the nominalists, as universals are part of that structure. — Wayfarer

I don't think I was ever disputing this claim. My original purpose was to point out the distinction between a cause and reason and warn one not to conflate them.

The article you linked about William of Ockham looks interesting. I'll try and read it here.

But the thing is, once we reject transcendentals, then we're also rejecting the superstructure that supports final causes - the 'why' of things. And that is exactly what got lost in the transition to modernity which wants to see everything in terms of efficient or material causation. Horkheimer, The Eclipse of Reason:

...argues that individuals in "contemporary industrial culture" experience a "universal feeling of fear and disillusionment", which can be traced back to the impact of ideas that originate in the Enlightenment conception of reason, as well as the historical development of industrial society. Before the Enlightenment, reason was seen as an objective force in the world. Now, it is seen as a "subjective faculty of the mind". In the process, the philosophers of the Enlightenment destroyed "metaphysics and the objective concept of reason itself." Reason no longer determines the "guiding principles of our own lives", but is subordinated to the ends it can achieve. In other words, reason is instumentalized.

The "why" of things, though, may be thought to be spiritually immanent in the how of things; just as the spiritual may be thought to be fully immanent in the physical, not transcendent, but merely hidden from us, due to our inability to be open to it.

Looked at this way the world is its own purpose; there cannot be some transcendent reason (a reason utterly beyond the world itself) as to why it exists, because, really such an idea can make no sense at all. Even if such an idea, ad absurdum, were granted coherency, it could never be any use to us at all; so why would we trouble ourselves with it?

As a follow up, your question also reminds me that for some time I've had the thought that Aristotle may prove useful in further clarifying and possibly widening Schopenhauer's metaphysics. I wrote some brief notes to myself on it a while ago and can share them with you if you want. — Thorongil

I'd be interested in reading what you have. I can't say that I ever thought that a connection could be made between Aristotle and Schopenhauer, considering Schopenhauer is indebted to Kant, and Kantian metaphysics is strikingly anti-realist in comparison to Aristotelian realism. If anything I would have thought Schopenhauer and Plato would have been similar...but Schopenhauer with his transcendental rejection of the immanent world paired with Aristotle's embrace of the teleological immanency? I don't know...

Not really. The transcendental is maintained all over the place within modernity. People are frequently against the insight that there is "no why" and an absence of final causation.

Final causation has merely been turned over to other values, a transcendence of scientism, progress and consumerism. It's just been shorn of older traditions and values (e.g. religion, God). The desire for transcendence, the notion our lives are worthless and need to be rescued, remains all over the place. Indeed, it drives the nihilistic outlook because it can't locate meaning or any guiding principle within ourselves.

Reason actually is instumentalised within the transcendent; the means by which humans are saved form their (supposedly) inherent ignominy.

I'd say the point of such "purpose" is precisely that it is beyond the world. A meaning that goes unaffected by the flux in the world. The idea or value can point to even if another doesn't hold it or the world contradicts it.

If that's is true, one can say: "and you purpose is X" even if someone disagrees or is otherwise. "God's plan" is probably the most obvious example. Anything terrible is turned from the pain of an injustice to something that's meant to happen. Or to use a more modernist example: "Technology will give us utopia we deserve." where terrible events of the world are hidden beneath the manifest destiny of a world which transcends suffering. "Purpose" is a fiction we use to enact power over the world, particularly our discourses.

Looked at this way the world is its own purpose; there cannot be some transcendent reason (a reason utterly beyond the world itself) as to why it exists, because, really such an idea can make no sense at all. — John

What if it is just the case that it makes no sense to you, because that way of thinking has been forgotten?

As for 'the world being it's own purpose' - that is what makes no sense. Consider the vast amount of literature, drama, art and philosophy churned out in the 20th Century about the purposlessness of the world. The idea of 'telos' in biology is a complete taboo, you're not even allowed to say it.

The originating quest of philosophy was to discern purposes, reasons, causes that were invisible to the ordinary eye. It was about 'discerning causes'. Now, science is still about that, but the only causes it wishes to discern are those that have instrumental value, as Horkheimer notes above. (I have discovered that this 'critique of the instrumentalisation of reason' is fundamental to the so-called New Left, I'm not well-schooled in that thinking but I think this aspect of their work is important, although as Marxists, they rejected anything transcendent in the Platonist sense.)

That literature, drama and art is actually a manifestation of the understanding the world is purposeful. People are driven to explore it because they think they do have purpose. Pointlessness is so painful to many because they think they must be otherwise to make sense.

For anyone who recognises pointlessness, it is, well, pointless. It has no impact on their lives and holds no consequences. They go about their lives, meaning and all, without being haunted by existential dread because they aren't empty without purpose.

Modernity has moved the insight of the pointless world into the popular, but alas it has not, at least for many, granted the insight of the world without a point. Instead of recognising the world without a point (life and meaning), they've maintained nihilism of the transcendental and think it's all meaningless unless it's given a purpose.

They go about their lives, meaning and all, without being haunted by existential dread because they aren't empty without purpose.

In which case, they're not likely to be troubled by philosophical questions, right? Like most people. But that is what is being discussed here, although sometimes that can be hard to discern.

In a certain sense, for sure. But being troubled is not the same as asking a question or understanding something. To be troubled in this way is not merely have an interest in philosophy or ask philosophical questions. Anyone can do that.

It is to feel a deep pain or longing to be something beyond oneself, to have a purpose which is more than just one's own existence. A search for the idea that saves the world from meaninglessness. In the past, these ideas (God, miracles, final cause, purpose) occupied a prominent place in how we understood the world and metaphysics. Knowledge that the world wasn't saved from its nihilism was considered impossible. God was necessary.

In modernity, this has changed. The shift of knowledge to the world, and away from what is supposedly beyond it, has undone the necessity of God. Now this "saving" God is understood as impossible. There is no being saved from the world. Logically, there must no God and we are stuck with the world as it exists.

The "troubled" no longer have an answer and, more importantly, philosophy precludes one. Not because gods, magic or the afterlife are impossible, but rather because it now recognises something outside our world cannot act upon us or save us. It recognises this saving God is just a fiction It promise is nothing more than a story we tell ourselves to feel better-- akin to consumerism, scientism, modernism, utopianism, fad diets, etc.,etc. While there is no doubt it works for many, makes their lives better, fills the troubling hole, someone paying attention can't help it works by telling the falsehood one's live is given by that which is not their life. Such fictions can no longer work for such people unless their willing to participate in doublethink or are content to know they are pretending.

It's realisation which is more destructive to belief in God than any empirical proof or ethical question. It removes the promise of God. Now not even God can save us, for our lives can only ever be are own. We are alone. No-one is there to ride in and save us. Nihilism prevails (or so it is thought).

But Nihilism only prevails because people are still looking to the beyond. They're still using the nihilistic approach which views the world as inherently inadequate. The hole is only there because they are unwilling to say: "The world is and the world means, in-itself." A trait shared with all the other fictions (e.g. consumerism, scientism, modernism, utopianism, fad diets, etc., etc.) of final cause or purpose which have come to dominate modernity.

One might say that we can be rather bad at learning how the world matters, so we often approximate with fictions that simultaneous confirm our worst fears (Nihilism) but also promise everything we want (Meaning), without undoing our own ignorance how the world means.

So no doubt people who recognises pointlessness are not "troubled" by philosophical questions in the way you suggest, but that's sort of the point. They've abandoned the nihilism which requires the fix you propose. Yet, seemingly, you would say these people a philosophically ignorant because they no longer look to the "beyond."

And this is the problem with your approach. You treat some of the philosophically wisest people, those who understands the world matters, who know that the horrors of the world are no excuse to say it doesn't matter, as if they are ignorant. All because they dare to overcome Nihilism and do not require the transcendent fiction to understand the world matters.

You treat some of the philosophically wisest people... as if they are ignorant. — Willow

For instance? Who would be some of the 'philosophically wisest people'? Any particular school of philosophy? Books or examples?

Nietszche, for example, felt that nihilism could be overcome by the will-to-power; Schopenhauer by aesthetic enjoyment; Camus by the heroic act of self-making in the knowledge of its ultimate futility.

Are those the kinds of examples you have in mind?

Nope. Nietszche is still seeking the beyond. Nihilism is still there for him, to be overcome by power and greatness. He pines for God even as he destroys him.

Camus gets bit closer. However, heroic act of self-knowledge is treated as the consolation prize to the inescapable futility of life. Still, the world is considered futile and inadequate, our act of knowledge is to know we are meaningless and their is nothing we can do about it-- nihilism still governs.

I'm talking about where nihilism is wholly rejected. The position where world is neither futile nor inadequate, where the world means in-itself. Where the transcendent is not required to save us because we were never meaningless in the first place.

Spinoza is probably the first name that came to mind. But lots of people understand this way, some interested in philosophy and some not. My point is not about any particular philosophy or author per se, but rather about how you limit philosophical wisdom to the context of soothing nihilism, rather than allowing it to positions which point out nihilism was never true in the first place. You would have say "Nihilism is true," just so people are "troubled" and can find the wisdom of the rescuing God.

You write posts that look as though they mean something, but they don't. So I'm not going to waste my life responding, do enjoy yours.

That's actually pretty good example of what I mean. You press Nihilism into to every philosophical context. I give an argument about the falsehood of Nihilism, you insist my argument must be meaningless.

Nihilism. I couldn't possibly be saying anything meaningful because that's not found of this world. You insist the only wisdom in this context is to think the world is meaningless and have the transcendent save it.

If someone doesn't think the world has a hole, if they are not "troubled," then anything the say is meaningless. They (supposedly) don't grasp what matters and lack any philosophical insight.

My posts don't mean anything? To the Nihilist maybe....

As a follow up, your question also reminds me that for some time I've had the thought that Aristotle may prove useful in further clarifying and possibly widening Schopenhauer's metaphysics. I wrote some brief notes to myself on it a while ago and can share them with you if you want. — Thorongil

Yes, I'd like to see that. Sometimes one philosopher makes you think about another one differently. For example, Whitehead's actual occasions are not really at odds with Schopenhauer's ideas and can in fact provide a generalized mechanism for Schopenhauer's dual-aspect theory. Schopenhauer was a sort of dual-aspect theorist. Actual occasions are a process/event.

The mental and the physical are not two causally linked realms, but two aspects of the same nature, where one cannot be reduced to or explained by the other. — Schopenhauer, Arthur from IEP

The double knowledge which each of us has of the nature and
activity of his own body, and which is given in two completely different ways, has now been clearly brought out. We shall accordingly make further use of it as a key to the nature of every phenomenon in nature, and shall judge of all objects which are not our own bodies, and are consequently not given to our consciousness in a double way but only as ideas, according to the analogy of our own bodies, and shall therefore assume that as in one aspect they are idea, just like our bodies, and in this respect are analogous to them, so in another aspect, what remains of objects when we set aside their existence as idea of the subject, must in its inner nature be the same as that in us which we
call will. — Schopenhauer WWR Book II

Now compare a summary of process philosophy from IEP:

The most counter-intuitive doctrine of process philosophy is its sharp break from the Aristotelian metaphysics of substance, that actuality is not made up of inert substances that are extended in space and time and only externally related to each other. Process thought instead states that actuality is made up of atomic or momentary events. These events, called actual entities or actual occasions, are “the final real things of which the world is made up,” (Whitehead, Process and Reality, 18). They occur very briefly and are characterized by the power of self-determination and subjective immediacy (though not necessarily conscious experience). In many ways, actual occasions are similar to Leibniz’s monads [link], except that occasions are internally related to each other.

The enduring objects one perceives with the senses (for example, rocks, trees, persons, etc.) are made up of serially ordered “societies,” or strings of momentary actual occasions, each flowing into the next and giving the illusion of an object that is continuously extended in time, much like the rapid succession of individual frames in a film that appear as a continuous picture. Contemporary commentators on process thought suggest that individual actual occasions vary in spatio-temporal “size” and can correspond to the phenomena of sub-atomic particles, atoms, molecules, cells, and human persons (that is, souls). Likewise, these individuals may aggregate together to form larger societies (for example, rocks, trees, animal bodies). According to this model, a single electron would be a series of momentary electron-occasions. Likewise, the human subject would be a series of single occasions that coordinates and organizes many of the billions of other actual occasions that make up the subject’s “physical” body. — Process Philosophy from IEP

It isn't hard to make the leap from acts of Will and actual occasions. They can be conflated to be, for all intents and purposes, the same metaphysical idea. Actual occasions are the vehicle for which Will constructs reality- interacting, configuring, etc. To bring in the element of "suffering" (Schopenhauer's perennial theme) I actually inadvertantly ran across this blog that brought to light another possible connection between process philosophy and Schopenhauer's Will/Pessimism.

Third, Whitehead retains the notion of final causation in the becoming of actual occasions, arguing that occasions are pursuing “satisfaction” or completion that they accomplish through the integration of prehensions in a novel and aesthetically pleasing unity. Consequently, it is the final cause that accounts for the becoming of an actual occasion in Whitehead. Where Whitehead attributes becoming to final causes, I attribute it to difference or disequilibrium. Objectiles become because they contain disequilibrium within themselves and disequilibriums are introduced into their being through interactions with other actual entities. Becoming is the resolution of these tensions or disequilibriums producing new properties or qualities in the objectile, but this resolution of tensions is not governed by final causality but rather by the mechanics underlying the internal organization of the objectile. The resolution of disequilibriums marks the death or completion of an objectile, though the dead entity can still function in the becoming of other objectiles through being prehended by these objectiles. — https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2009/03/07/objectiles-and-actual-occasions/

This blog author's idea of disequilibriums sounds similar to the dissatisfaction/deprivation of Will's primum mobile. Constant disequalibriums are causing configurations, etc. Though this is at somewhat odds with Whitehead's other notions (as noted in the article), combining this disequalibrium idea with Whitehead's idea of eternal objects which keep the configurations as similarities (universals) you have a parallel with Schopenhauer's use of Ideas. Personally, I am not sure about the need for the Platonic backing of universals- but you can see that even this, would at least seem right at home in Schopenhauer's philosophy.