I'll share some thoughts on Feuerbach's philosophical religion. 'God' is all of us, greater than any one of us individually. Some are wiser and brighter than others, but even these are wiser and brighter because they are plugged into others, because they are open to difference, assimilating it and shattering one narrower self-conception after another. This world, in which we have bodies, is already the world for us. It could always use some work (giving something real to do), but a healthy body in healthy relationships with necessities met is already almost in paradise--if the mind is right. With philosophy (Feuerbach's vision), even death can be made sense of. As narrow individuals, we are already dead to the degree that we are not lit up where we should be. The threat of bodily death (ego death) encourages us to push beyond our petty self-attachments and grasp something like Feuerbach's philosophy in the first place.
The narrow world is widened. We think of the billions that come and go, the billions living equally meaningful lives, some of them always more meaningful, wiser and bright. Others get this or that righter than we do as we get something else righter than they do. Thanks to language and matter (the stuff with a kind of memory that resists being engraved), we inherit the work of others. Our work is passed on to 'reincarnated' versions of ourselves. For Feuerbach something like reincarnation seems metaphorically true. If we find the best part of ourselves in others, including those not yet born, then we don't exactly die. We feel and not only think ourselves the flame and not the melting candle. — macrosoft
Philosophy is from this perspective necessarily personal, and yet it is personal in a way that seeks the living impersonal. — macrosoft
The last fantasy is that insincere or emotionally closed conversations are the way to do things. This fits the image of philosophy as turning the crank on the argument machine. — macrosoft
I wonder if you are pointing at thought independent of language/words? — macrosoft
I'm suggesting something like a pre-human 'bottom' of our mind/language. Some things are just so automatic that we live rather than see them. With difficultly we can get a vague sense of them, by looking at certain problems in attempts at explicit accounts.
Children do not learn that books exist, that armchairs exist, etc.,etc.---they learn to fetch books, sit in armchairs, etc.,etc.
Does a child believe that milk exists?
Are we to say that the knowledge that there are physical things comes very late or very early? — macrosoft
Creativesoul and Macrosoft -
It is interesting listening to your exchange. The main point of interest for me being what either of you mean by “language.” It isn’t clear to me where either of you are sketching (have sketched) out a starting point from which to continue. — I like sushi
There a few things we know about language and a few ways the term “language” is used. From evidence it does appear that language is not learnt but rather an innate capacity. — I like sushi
We also know that people without a “language” (in the everyday “wordy” sense of the term) can and do communicate. Examples of feral children show what appears to be a lack of a “language instinct” at first glance, but with a further investigation we learn that this is more to do with familiarity with humans in a social capacity than exposure to some “language” - evidence coming from deaf people with no language coming to aquire language very late on in life. — I like sushi
The problem we’re always going to have here is delineating what we mean by one sense of “language” and another. For example it is acceptable for linguists to call bee dances “language” yet we know perfectly well we’re not talking about a complex grammatical structure or anything like this “language” I am writing in now. — I like sushi
There is also the fact that spoken language is constantly shifting. We cannot insist upon what people say and what terms and phraseology falls in and out of fashion (although some speakers do try and keep a baseline standard in order to keep a more precise universal communciation an approachable idea eve if we understand that we’ll never truly arrive at a moment of complete understanding. — I like sushi
What is “pre-lingual” thought? This is quite easy to understand for me at least. It is basically our “imagination.” I don’t need words to think about visual imagery, nor about a piano concerto. — I like sushi
The deaf people mentioned above don’t share a common symbolic form of representing what they wish to convey. What they do is pantomime what happened to them that day; they’re able to act out and convey some story, to joke, to laugh, to comprehend what each other is conveying with some basic gestures and use of facial expressions - this is due to empathy and mirror neurons. — I like sushi
If we’re going to talk of “thought without language or words” then we’re defining “language” in a preset manner. To make any reasonable ground in this area it is unwise to hold a view of “language” that conflicts with many other academic views of “language” - as mentioned above MANY linguistics would not say grammar or words are necessarily “language.” What is going on is much more than mere symbolic representation. We have a huge array of conveying these differences with adjectives, nouns, subjects, abstractions, etc.,.
We also know from various brain lesions that very particular parts of perceptions and language (worded/written) use become jumbled and are even eradicated. There are alos set developmental stages of human perception and languge acquisition. — I like sushi
I don’t believe you’re a physicist — I like sushi
big difference between being in the world and an object's specific state of being. The latter can inform the former, but Heidegger views the two as interchangeable imo. Again, I haven't read Being and Time but have viewed multiple lectures on it. — VMF
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