I'm not sure if what I said addresses this. Could you elaborate if I misinterpreted — javra

I was referring to the finite resolution of language as I sometimes experience it. The lifestream can take itself as an 'object' (it has a kind of memory of itself or presence for itself). Language is most real, I'm tempted to say, as it rushes by. Meaning both remembers and anticipates. It's not (for me, for the most part) instantaneously present. It is 'stretched' and 'on the way.'

What I mean is something like the 'I' who uses language is not exactly an 'I.' The subject that speaks this theoretical fiction of the subject is already plural in some sense, already speaking 'outward.' — sign

:up: I very much like that. :smile: There is no living being that exists devoid of other living beings with which it interacts. Even the most solitary and un-evolved of lifeforms live among predators and prey. The existence of experience is not an "I" but a "we".

Though, here thinking of Sartre's play "No Exit", this can be a blessing as well as a curse. :razz:

Language is most real, I'm tempted to say, as it rushes by. Meaning both remembers and anticipates. It's not (for me, for the most part) instantaneously present. It is 'stretched' and 'on the way.' — sign

Here again, I agree.

Derrida falls squarely within the movement which regards the role of utterances in actual discourse as the essence of language and meaning, and which therefore regards logic as derivative from rhetorical considerations. — intro

Derrida Shmerrida

:up: I very much like that. :smile: There is no living being that exists devoid of other living beings with which it interacts. Even the most solitary and un-evolved of lifeforms live among predators and prey. The existence of experience is not an "I" but a "we".

Though, here thinking of Sartre's play "No Exit", this can be a blessing as well as a curse. :razz: — javra

Nice. I'm glad we can meet on this. You focused perhaps on external community (one important aspect) while I was focusing on something like 'internal community' (the other side). And I agree about other people sometimes being hell.

I postulate two basic intentions, something like opening and closure. We see this on philosophy forums. Some people are clearly in the mood to find others in error (possess the truth solely, denying any kind of mystery or darkness yet to be explored.) Others are clearly in the mood to find common ground and maybe share in the pleasure of what they both already understand. I'm no saint. I understand that it's nice to feel more along some path than others. But I'm glad to be primarily in mode (as I understand it) of genuinely wanting to share in some beautiful ideas and simultaneously expose them to questioning and therefore enrichment that I couldn't foresee.

This goes back to our earlier theme. Value and intention is fundamental. We can approach someone (including some author) from the very beginning with a will to negate (hide in ourselves as already-knowing) or a will to explore ('confessing' that just maybe we still have something to learn from others). I have a sense that maybe the great thinkers (my favorites) were very much open. They 'suffered ' dissonance and tarried with the negative, thereby synthesizing a better positive account. I adore Hegel for his awareness of this process. The process became self-conscious in Hegel, one might say. (And maybe centuries before in others in other lands entirely.)

Here again, I agree. — javra

I think this 'rush' of meaning is why 'time' was Heidegger's symbol or synonym for existence at one point. The first draft of Being and Time was called The Concept of Time. I am recently finding that Husserl (who I should have checked out long ago) was already on to lots of 'post-Husserlian' insights in his published and unpublished work. Husserl's theory of 'monads' is fascinating. He tries to do justice to what it's like to be 'alone' and yet share a world and share concepts. And he tries to describe the rush of meanings or 'phenomenological time.' I love this stuff for just trying to look at what is most intimate. I love the idea of philosophy as a becoming more aware of what is already here (as opposed to constructing complicated theories.)

Admittedly revealing what is 'already here' can look like the construction of complicated theories at times. There is something like the 'fixed idea' of an isolated ego shut off from reality-in-itself that is taken for granted. I'm not saying such a theory is bad or doesn't get something right. I'm just talking about the way that a critical discourse perhaps always holds something fixed and unquestioned in way that blinds it. Maybe we only ever theorize by holding something fixed, no matter how radically free we'd like our critical thought to be. [Oh no, am I repeating the same structure I am criticizing as insufficiently critical? I'll leave it in anyway.] Anyway, this is where Heidegger's 'dismantling' comes in. Sometimes we 'cover over' what is there with theories of what 'must' be there.

Some people are clearly in the mood to find others in error (possess the truth solely, denying any kind of mystery or darkness yet to be explored.) Others are clearly in the mood to find common ground and maybe share in the pleasure of what they both already understand. I'm no saint. — sign

Yea, I share that feeling. Being anything but saintly myself, I'll gravitate toward closure in some situations. But its one thing I always admired about many of the ancient skeptics (which I've now come to nickname fallibilists): they sought open-mindedness and thereby greater understanding. The other side of things can, often enough, be all-knowning of all pertinent absolute truths. Not my cup of tee.

BTW, wanted to share this since it seems to me to be pertinent to the discussion:

There was a man with tongue of wood
Who essayed to sing,
And in truth it was lamentable.
But there was one who heard
The clip-clapper of this tongue of wood
And knew what the man
Wished to sing,
And with that the singer was content. — Stephen Crane

This in context of meaning as value and the signs we thereby produce. Beside which, I like this guys poetry.

Yea, I share that feeling. Being anything but saintly myself, I'll gravitate toward closure in some situations. But its one thing I always admired about many of the ancient skeptics (which I've now come to nickname fallibilists): they sought open-mindedness and thereby greater understanding. The other side of things can, often enough, be all-knowning of all pertinent absolute truths. Not my cup of tee. — javra

I am fascinated by the ancient skeptics too, for the same reasons. I believe in sharing the best ideas I currently know and at the same time holding to a kind of openness.

BTW, wanted to share this since it seems to me to be pertinent to the discussion:

There was a man with tongue of wood
Who essayed to sing,
And in truth it was lamentable.
But there was one who heard
The clip-clapper of this tongue of wood
And knew what the man
Wished to sing,
And with that the singer was content.
— Stephen Crane

This in context of meaning as value and the signs we thereby produce. Beside which, I like this guys poetry. — javra

I love Stephen Crane. I've even read Maggie. He is a very fascinating personality. He has a cutting intensity.

I guess we really have to give the meaning 'behind' the signs its due. It's just a fact of experience that sometimes we feel truly understood. We are satisfied. Feeling seems to come into play. The value of what is being said has to be understood along with the content (isolating aspects of what is really a unity.)

And he tries to describe the rush of meanings or 'phenomenological time.' — sign

Interesting concept, one that I might be inadvertently paralleling in my own philosophical musings. Husserl is one more person I haven't yet read. Do you recommend any particular work his that best focuses on this concept of "phenomenological time"?

Interesting concept, one that I might be inadvertently paralleling in my own philosophical musings. Husserl is one more person I haven't yet read. Do you recommend any particular work his that best focuses on this concept of "phenomenological time"? — javra

I am just getting into him, so I'm reading secondary summaries and already being amazed. I think he wrote a particular essay on that.

This is great so far.
https://www.amazon.com/Edmund-Husserl-Phenomenology-Dermot-Moran/dp/074562121X

And this was the first one I started with:
https://www.amazon.com/Phenomenology-Explained-Experience-Insight-Ideas/dp/0812697979

I found it extremely disciplined in its exposition. It's shorter than the one I'm on now. It's hard to pick a favorite. Both/either are great, if you don't mind starting with a secondary source. Apparently there is steady steam of unpublished work being leaked out, so there's something to be said for trusting an expert anthology of the main points in this case. Husserl just didn't publish most of his thinking, for various reasons. There's a dramatic story about a mountain of his writing being saved from the nazis.

For this and other reasons, Husserl, in his On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893-1917) (1991), deemed time-consciousness the most “important and difficult of all phenomenological problems” (PCIT, No. 50, No. 39). — IEP

https://www.iep.utm.edu/phe-time/#H1

Got it. Thanks for the links.

Awesome. Should be food for further conversation. I think 'time' is central somehow.

I think 'time' is central somehow. — sign

Couldn't agree more.

Should be food for further conversation. — sign

I look forward to them. :cool:

For Husserl (at one point in his thinking) history was

nothing other than the living moment of being-with-one-another and in-one-another of original meaning-constitution and meaning-sedimentation. — Husserl

This is along the lines of what I am interested in, the functioning and genesis (sedimentation) and perhaps mortality of 'public' meaning --the kind that makes this sentence more or less intelligible to you, dear reader. Are you with me as I write this? Not actually but perhaps virtually, in all of your ambiguity. And aren't I virtually present as the unity of a voice that sews these words together? In the same way we don't see patches of color but objects in a worldly context, 'immediately.' Artificial theories ignore the 'immediate unity' of the voice among voices and of enworlded objects, postulating simpler entities as their ingredients. 'I am an ego or pure witness or being itself who/that unconsciously transforms a therefore un-see-able input into objects in a causal nexus by joining concepts to intuitions.' And then we can build up a world from inter-subjectivity. So break the situation into parts and put them back again to recover the situation. This has its merits. But how seriously should we take these parts? How much life remains in these constructions?

Debates often take these parts for granted as uncontroversial entities. 'Mind' is a bishop and 'matter' is a knight on the chessboard. The sign has slipped away from the historical voice, and seems to shine with an independent meaning (and maybe it does, but how determinate is this meaning?)

I relate this to Hegel, who seemed to be thinking of the evolution and the becoming-more-complex-and-self-referential tendency of an accumulated sediment. The self mirrors or repeats or even sometimes leads the social sedimentation of meaning. I have to catch up with the conversation, catch up with my own time (its cutting edge) if I dream of extending as opposed to merely repeating an already overcome-but-not-forgotten distinction.

I pulled out some quotes that speak to me.

[C]onsciousness owes its privileged status...to the possibility of a living vocal medium. Since self-consciousness appears only in its relation to an object, whose presence it can keep and repeat, it is never perfectly foreign or anterior to the possibility of language. Husserl no doubt did want to maintain, as we shall see, an originally silent, "pre-expressive" stratum of experience. But since the possibility of constituting ideal objects belongs to the essence of consciousness, and since these ideal objects are historical products, only appearing thanks to acts of creation or intending, the element of consciousness and the element of language will be more and more difficult to discern. Will not their indiscernibility introduce nonpresence and difference (mediation, signs, referral back, etc.) in the heart of self-presence?
...
It is not in the sonorous substance or in the physical voice, in the body of speech in the world, that he will recognize an original affinity with the logos in general, but in the voice phenomenologically taken, speech in its transcendental flesh, in the breath, the intentional animation that transforms the body of the word into flesh, makes of the Korper a Leib, a geistige Leiblichkeit. The phenomenological voice would be this spiritual flesh that continues to speak and be present to itself—to hear itself—in the absence of the world.
...
[W]hat is signified by phenomenology's "principle of principles"? What does the value of primordial presence to intuition as source of sense and evidence, as the a priori of a prioris, signify? First of all it signifies the certainty, itself ideal and absolute, that the universal form of all experience (Erlebnis), and therefore of all life, has always been and will always be the present. The present alone is and ever will be. Being is presence or the modification of presence. The relation with the presence of the present as the ultimate form of being... — Derrida

I've just recently read 'The Ends of Man,' an essay in Margins about humanism and metaphysics and it's associated 'we.' Derrida jokes about whether this we has ever left the church.

IMV, humanism is more or less the thing itself. What is the end or purpose of being human? For Hegel and Heidegger, the human was not understood in its transcendent majesty. Heidegger's distancing himself from humanism was just a distancing from an insufficiently radical humanism, an insufficiently radical conception of the human.

Pure meaning, utterly distinct from its 'body,' is like God utterly distinct from the world. As God descends into the world, meaning descends into the sign and its entanglement in time and matter. And a similar movement includes man 'reeling in' his projection of his own divine essence into some beyond. Heaven becomes a classless society down here, or a union of egoists, or a society of creative individuals of where love is pretty much the only law and there is no sharp line between poetry and science, etc.

Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man’s inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! “Have courage to use your own reason!”- that is the motto of enlightenment. — Kant

In other words, the kingdom of God is within you as universal reason. The basic thrust of philosophy seems to be a wrenching free of the human from a trans-human authority. On the other hand, this is manged in terms of a universal or species-wide 'human essence' which is not personal or idiosyncratic.

An ironic rejection of humanism at first seems possible along these lines:

Now if we stop at these absolutely empty forms which originate from the absoluteness of the abstract ego, nothing is treated in and for itself and as valuable in itself, but only as produced by the subjectivity of the ego. But in that case the ego can remain lord and master of everything, and in no sphere of morals, law, things human and divine, profane and sacred, is there anything that would not first have to be laid down by the ego, and that therefore could not equally well be destroyed by it. Consequently everything genuinely and independently real becomes only a show, not true and genuine on its own account or through itself, but a mere appearance due to the ego in whose power and caprice and at whose free disposal it remains. To admit or cancel it depends wholly on the pleasure of the ego, already absolute in itself simply as ego. — Hegel

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ae/introduction.htm#s7-3

Of course this ego, the 'unique,' is a fiction. It is a repeatable meaning act that can be approximately shared. One can even dream of a utopian 'union of egoists.' Every one take joy in the mutual recognition of radical freedom --a freedom however that is no longer so radical in that it recognizes the freedom of the other. In short, this isn't really anti-humanism, or it could only be so as a disgusting kind of thuggishness. It's high form of humanism if one includes its ellipsis. Stirner expanded the paragraph above into a book and published it with what only makes sense as an evangelical intention. The 'unique' was a repeatable meaning act, even if it is supposed to point beyond or beneath all concepts.

If the ego remains at this standpoint, everything appears to it as null and vain, except its own subjectivity which therefore becomes hollow and empty and itself mere vanity.[53] But, on the other hand, the ego may, contrariwise, fail to find satisfaction in this self-enjoyment and instead become inadequate to itself, so that it now feels a craving for the solid and the substantial, for specific and essential interests. Out of this comes misfortune, and the contradiction that, on the one hand, the subject does want to penetrate into truth and longs for objectivity, but, on the other hand, cannot renounce his isolation and withdrawal into himself or tear himself free from this unsatisfied abstract inwardness. — Hegel

In short, assuming that one through the ideology of the pure ego comes to 'full self-possession,' this possessed self only has its worth in the first place (even for itself) in terms of the We. 'Some are born posthumously.' A outermost rebel dreams of his proper readers. This 'we' may be a community not yet available, a virtual community. One sacred We is rejected in terms of another.

Continuing the thought of the previous posts, certain negative or critical thinkers can be understood to be continuing the Enlightenment even as they criticize it. We can think of the substitution of master words, one used to pry the previous one loose which itself becomes confining. A 'shallow' humanism is replaced with some kind of proximity to Being. What is highest in man is not that he is lord of this world but rather his responding to the call of Being, etc. Whatever is cursed as anthropomorphic is only cursed in the name of a higher anthropomorphism. The end of man is the transcendence of man, one might say. Naturally, then, one humanism displaces its preceding humanism as an insufficiently radical thinking of the human.

We said, with regard to thought, that there is no asking what its meaning is, since it is its own meaning; there is nothing hidden behind it – not, however, in the ordinary sense of that expression, for thought itself is the ultimate, the deepest, behind which there is nothing further; it is entirely itself. — Hegel

Meaning is being or reality is meaning.

Thought is proper to man alone – not, however, to man only as an isolated individual subject; we have to look at thought as essentially objective. — Hegel

Language is there, like the world. Language is the essence of the world. To live in the human world (in other words the world) is to live in meaning or significance. Heidegger seems to repeat Hegel in terms of being with others through language. The pre-interpretedness that veils certain modes of being is a sedimentation of 'spirit.' And Wittgenstein also seemed to be pointing at something the our immersion in a distributed ambiguous meaning-field. What I get from Wittgenstein and Derrida is an awareness of how tangled up meaning is in the 'non-mental.' And of course Heidegger dissolved the subject into tool-use and the object into a tool-being-used. (Among other things.) The focus on meaning as being doesn't seem to have went anyway. 'All philosophy is idealism.' Instead we seem to have an increased self-consciousness of the incarnation of 'essence' (meaning) in 'non-meaning.' The 'holy essence' is ground into its other.

===

The temple of reason in its consciousness of itself is loftier than Solomon’s temple and others built by man.

In everyday life, of course, we have to do with opinions, i.e., thoughts about external things; one has one opinion, another has another. But in the business of the world’s Spirit there is a completely different seriousness; it is there that universality is. There it is a question of the universal determination of the Spirit, nor do we speak of this or that one’s opinion. The universal Spirit develops in itself according to its own necessity; its opinion is simply the truth.

A third conclusion to be drawn from what has been said up to this point is that we are not dealing with what is past but rather with actual thinking, with our own spirit. Properly speaking, then, this is not a history, since the thoughts, the principles, the ideas with which we are concerned belong to the present; they are ‘determinations within our own spirit.

But the heart must be dead which finds satisfaction with dead bodies. The spirit of truth and life lives only in what is. The living spirit speaks: “Let the dead bury their dead;. follow me!” If I know thoughts, truths, cognitions, only, historically, they remain outside my spirit, i.e., for me they are dead; neither my thinking nor my spirit is present in them; what is most interior to me, my thought, is absent.
— Hegel

'Universal spirit' is the stuff we take for granted, that which is simply the truth, the (currently) unquestionable. The unquestionable universal spirit is unstable though. It can be unveiled and made questionable. It even unveils itself by questioning itself, wounding itself with the understanding's distinctions until it can gather them all up as the temple of its own-self-consciousness. Of course reason is the essence of man, the essentially human, so the highest temples build so far by man (still trapped in self-alienation to a greater or lesser degree) are nothing beside the temple that reason builds for itself, a tower of Babel, a ladder that can be thrown away.

Is a resentment toward the self-love in humanism just the attempt to make the human more lovable for the human? 'I don't love all this self-love in humanism. I'd prefer (love more) [alternative.]' Is there a clear gap between humanism and religion imagined as a non-humanism? Has 'God' not always been a word for what is highest for and therefore in man? Is the issue really about lifestyle? Imagery? Is this holy man apart from commerce and entanglement? Or can the holy man be the world spirit on horseback, surveying his realm? Does the holy man work in a pin factory? Can we find the essence of a humanism in an image like this?

Forgive all these posts please if you find them boring. Respond to any part of them though, please, if they pique your interest.

Is metaphysics the desire to climb out of its own skin? Is humanism is the desire of the human to climb out of his own history as skin? And yet metaphysics can only climb away from itself with what it has of itself. The humanism that is climbed out of is climbed out of by a yet higher humanism.

How will metaphysics know that it has finally succeeded at climbing out of itself unless it can see that skin on the floor as a circle, a totality? And what is this completed no-longer-metaphysics but a vision of its skin on the floor? its own quieted corpse-as-chrysalis, its ladder dropped to the ground, the body that tied it to mortality and confusion?

Philosophy, then, is one aspect of the total manifestation of spirit – consciousness of spirit being its supreme flowering, since its effort is to know what spirit is. It is, in fact, the dignity of man to know what he is and to know this in the purest manner, i.e., to attain to the thinking of what he is. — Hegel

And what is his dignity then if not in being a philosopher? Man is metaphysics, and metaphysics is time that would climb out of itself into its future (an eternity-to-be) in terms of its past as mastered memory.

How does Nietzsche fit into this? For Derrida he was

... the joyous affirmation of the play of the world and of the innocence of becoming, the affirmation of a world of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin which is offered to an active interpretation. — Derrida

Is active interpretation not directed nevertheless at a humanism that cancels itself in its next interpretation? Is the essence of metaphysics not presence but an ecstatically self-eating humanism? I read Derrida with the same kind of pleasure I get from Hegel. I feel a basic continuity.

What does it mean to say that nothing is hidden? 'The universal Spirit develops in itself according to its own necessity; its opinion is simply the truth.' Universal spirit is the groundless ground of a form of life. The pre-theoretical anyone puts language to work, not on vacation. It knows well enough what it means when it flips the bird or stops at a red light. It knows how to flirt and make a graceful exit. It doesn't stop to misunderstand language in terms of some theory. It lives in language. (We can talk endlessly about what it is to live in language.)

Theories of language are in some sense theologies. The essence of the world is the universal spirit is the chatter of the they, the groundless ground in which no depth is hidden. One knows how to use language as one knows how to chew one's food. Language is there, like the world, as the essence of the world entangled in the doings of the world. The illusion of depth is sustained by the theory of the theory that unveils. To see language is just to unlearn theories of language and start paying attention to what one was always already doing. And a further question might be whether Wittgenstein is what is most fascinating or rather the phenomenon of language he helps unveil. Of course we still have a theory here of a theory that unveils. It's the theory of theory as veil. What was it for theory to take itself as its own truest enemy? The lust for the pre-theoretical, life in the flesh, the real beneath theory and not above it. Incarnation.

Is there an 'experience of language' to be had? A basic insight? I'm tempted to say yes. Sincere listening and speaking is already language working. Dogmatic theories about speaking just clog up the works, switching off a know-how and switching on a far less sophisticated explicit theory.

And 'game' of course can become one more master word that draws us toward its expert-managed guru-tended secret. More theory. The anti-theory becomes pretty soon a body of sacred knowledge, requiring the assistance of a Virgil through its torments. Is it possible to avoid this role of preserving the flame? Defending the Correct interpretation? What is hidden is of course just how nothing happens to be hidden, the how of that nothing's hiding.