So substance dualism then. And yet Aristotle did such a good job of deconstructing the very notion of substantial being. :)

I would have said that thoughts exist but are not real, as realism typically is about an external reality beyond the mind. — darthbarracuda

The way I conceive reality is not in contradistinction to the imaginary. For me the imaginary is simply real in a different way than material existence. The imaginary is thus real, but it does not exist. So, it seems that my conception is diametrically opposed to yours.

No, I don't believe in substances of any kind and nor am I a monist, dualist or pluralist of any kind. You may find it inconvenient to be unable to fit me into a box, but I can't help that. >:)

If you tell me that: "I do tend to think of being or existence in terms of tangible beings or existents that can exert tangible forces that work as efficient or material causes", then the box fits you mighty well.

If you find the label of substance dualism inconvenient, you will have to explain why in light of what you wrote.

"Tangible" or "material" simply means tangible to human percipients. The spiritual is real insofar as it is experienced. The material exists insofar as it is experienced as such.

I have made no claim of a substantive existence beyond that.

it is still an implicit duality.

I agree and I probably only diverge in that I equate being with existence and that I do not think being exhausts reality. I would say there is also spirit ... — John

Are you suggesting that spirit is somehow not being? Peirce characterized spirit as "disembodied mind," and hence Thirdness; it is real and has being, but (strictly speaking) does not exist.

... and that it is on account of spirit that there can be final and formal causation, and beauty, goodness and truth as well. — John

Peirce held that final and formal causation are also manifestations of Thirdness, while beauty, goodness, and truth are the proper ends of feeling (Firstness), action (Secondness), and thought (Thirdness), respectively; i.e., the subject matter of the normative sciences, which are esthetics, ethics, and logic (semeiotic).

Sure, but it's a duality of kinds of experience. That there are these kinds of experience I think is simply irrefutable. But we don't need to, and I believe are not justified in, drawing any metaphysical kinds of conclusions from the fact of the different kinds of experience.

Are you suggesting that spirit is somehow not being? Peirce characterized spirit as "disembodied mind," and hence Thirdness; it is real and has being, but (strictly speaking) does not exist. — aletheist

That's right, I don't think spirit is rightly thought of as any kind of being.

Peirce held that final and formal causation are also manifestations of Thirdness, while beauty, goodness, and truth are the proper ends of feeling (Firstness), action (Secondness), and thought (Thirdness), respectively; i.e., the subject matter of the normative sciences, which are esthetics, ethics, and logic (semeiotic). — aletheist

I don't think that beauty, goodness and truth are rightly thought of as the "subject matters" of aesthetics, ethics and logic, but as the foundations of those disciplines, whose real subject matters are our judgements of beauty, goodness and truth. Beauty, goodness and truth are unanalyzable and so cannot be the subject matters of discursive inquiry, rather they respectively make the different kinds of discursive inquiry associated with them possible and so must simply be presupposed, in my view.

Sure, but it's a duality of kinds of experience. That there are these kinds of experience I think is simply irrefutable. But we don't need to, and I believe are not justified in, drawing any metaphysical kinds of conclusions from the fact of the different kinds of experience. — John

The point of philosophy is to draw such distinctions. Otherwise why not just be positivist about it?

Peirce characterized spirit as "disembodied mind," and hence Thirdness; it is real and has being, but (strictly speaking) does not exist. — aletheist

I'm interested in any philosophies that make this kind of distinction.

The point of philosophy is to draw such distinctions. Otherwise why not just be positivist about it? — Wayfarer

But, I have drawn the important distinction between the two kinds of experience. It is further metaphysical conclusions I am refusing to draw. I think "the point of any philosophy" is the inquiry as to how to best live, philosophy is primarily ethical; and I don't believe metaphysics is required for that inquiry at all. Also, many modern philosophers have eschewed the kind of traditional metaphysics you seem to be saying is the point of any philosophy, among whom are arguably four of the most important: Kant, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein and Heidegger.

I have no sympathy with the positivists at all, so I don't what you had in mind with that comment.

If you give credence to 'spiritual experience', then what is the 'object' of that knowledge? I might agree that there are such experiences and that they're significant, but if there's an entire domain of such experiences which seems not to be known to science, then what is its basis?

I think the answer has to be some form of dualism. And it doesn't have to be traditional or traditionalist for its own sake. I think Critique of Pure Reason is the most important metaphysical text of our day and I would hope not to be in conflict with it.

"Tangible" or "material" simply means tangible to human percipients. The spiritual is real insofar as it is experienced. The material exists insofar as it is experienced as such. — John

However, the 'experience of the material' can be made subject to quantitative analysis. But where is that kind of objectivity in respect of spiritual experience? There seems a noticeable lack of unanimity about such matters in the history of religion and philosophy,

If you give credence to 'spiritual experience', then what is the 'object' of that knowledge? I might agree that there are such experiences and that they're significant, but if there's an entire domain of such experiences which seems not to be known to science, then what is its basis? — Wayfarer

There is no "object of knowledge" of spiritual experience. The knowing is direct ; the experience is the knowing. Think about love; what is the object of the experience of love? You might say "the beloved", but I would say that the experience, not the object of the experience, of love is the beloved; the two are not separate.

Science can only deal with objectified experience. This is where the experience is broken up, such that part of it is externalized and then treated as something to be analyzed and modeled mathematically or in terms of mechanical causality. This is not possible with spiritual experience of any kind, whether it be of the most everyday, or of the most esoteric, kind. Really all experience is spiritual; it is only on reflection that it is fractured into external and internal, subjective and objective. Every moment of your life is spiritual experience.

However, the 'experience of the material' can be made subject to quantitative analysis. But where is that kind of objectivity in respect of spiritual experience? There seems a noticeable lack of unanimity about such matters in the history of religion and philosophy, — Wayfarer

Yes, I think it is done as I explained above. There is no such "objectivity" when it comes to spiritual experience. Our experience is both finite and infinite. It is finite insofar as it is reflected upon, and broken down into components to be modeled and operated upon. It is infinite insofar as it is also completely beyond any such fracturing, modeling and operating. The finite is nature, as conceived by science, and the infinite is spirit. The finite is unlimited possibility, where no possibility is ever really actualized, because others always come immediately to take their place, and thus no certainty is ever possible. The infinite is eternal mystery, where no possibility could ever be great enough, and wherein certainty can be found in unknowing. The infinite mystery is discovered in faith, and the finite world of endless possibility is discovered in belief. At least that is my tentative understanding at the moment.

I'm quite in agreement with the intuition, but I think in the context of philosophy, something something else needs to be said, which is what I have been labouring to say in this thread.

I think Critique of Pure Reason is the most important metaphysical text of our day and I would hope not to be in conflict with it. — Wayfarer

I think Kant rejects the idea that traditional metaphysics is possible. It was traditionally understood that metaphysical truths could be arrived at by pure reason. Kant showed just why that is not possible. He established the limits of pure reason to make way for practical reason, or faith. According to Kant, we are entitled to believe in God, immortality and freedom only on account of the fact that we experience ourselves to be morally responsible. Morally responsibility is of the very highest practical importance, and it is on account of that that we are entitled to believe.

But where I diverge from Kant is that he did not allow for moral intuition or spiritual experience. But it's not that I think we believe on account of spiritual experience; I think of it the other way around; we have spiritual experience because we believe. But believing in this sense is not believing in the sense of believing some proposition or other. It is more like a disposition than it is like believing anything. It is faith, and faith is the disposition of being open to the relationship between Man and God; it is the necessary disposition of the relationship between your Self and your God.

This aspect of faith as openness rather than as propositional belief is also implicit in a Buddhist text I read some years ago called The Awakening of Faith by Asvaghosa

I can't imagine in the context of philosophy for whose benefit something else needs to be said, to be honest. I think spiritual intuition and the persuasiveness of its rhetoric is all too little regarded in philosophy these days.

The metaphysics Kant criticized were those of his predecessors and indeed the sholastic etc. But i think Kant was still recognisably part of a tradition going back to Plato. He adopted the Aristotelean categories and didn't reject them wholesale. Not that Plato was infallible, and I don't think the basic idea of 'anamnesis' holds up at all, with respect to empirical knowledge - that a subject could recall specific information about actual tasks by remembering them. Although I sometimes think that the goal of anamnesis is the recall of liberative knowledge, not knowledge of particulars, and the 'integral vision' that goes with it.

I respect the Ashvagosha text, that is a fundamental textbook of Mahayana. But what interests me in this topic is precisely the neglected wisdom of Western philosophy in particular. But I also agree that Kant didn't sufficiently recognise spiritual intuition. Interesting comment on that from Eric Reitan:

Kant calls the world of appearances “empirical reality”—it is real in the sense that it’s a given, something we have to come to grips with. But even though space and time are therefore “empirically real,” they are not for Kant a feature of things as they are in themselves apart from our experience. They are, rather, the necessary form in which our faculties of perception present objects to us in experience. Kant captures this idea by saying that space and time, while empirically real, are transcendentally ideal. That is, they are a real part of the empirical world (the world of phenomena) but not of the noumena that lie behind or beyond the empirical world.

If all of this is correct, then “ultimate” reality is unknowable. And, as I pointed out in the last post, this implication of Kant’s thought was not one that others were prepared simply to accept. In the intellectual generation immediately following Kant, there were two towering figures in philosophy and theology who, each in his own way, sought a pathway beyond the wall of unknowability that Kant had erected around the noumenal.

I’m speaking, of course, of Schleiermacher and Hegel. Both thought that Kant had missed something important—namely, that the self which experiences the world is also a part of the world it is experiencing. Rather than there being this sharp divide between the experiencing subject and things-in-themselves, with phenomena emerging at the point of interface, the experiencing subject is a thing-in-itself. It is one of the noumena—or, put another way, the self that experiences the world is part of the ultimate reality that lies behind experience. ...

...consider how Schleiermacher dealt with the...conundrum--that is, with fact that even if I am a noumenal self, the self as I appear to myself may not be all that similar to what I am in myself. Schleiermacher dealt with this conundrum by privileging a distinct mode of self-consciousness, one in which all attempts to make the self into an object of consciousness—that is, all attempts to come to know the self—are set aside. When the self is made an object of study it becomes a phenomenon, and as such is divorced from the noumenal self. But it is possible to simply be—to become quiescent, if you will, and simply be what one is rather than attempt to know what one is.

And in this place of cognitive stillness, one discovers in a direct experiential way an ultimate reality that cannot be conceptualized or made into an object of study. This is the domain of mystical experience—and even though it is ineffable (that is, even if it cannot be made into an object of knowledge) it brings with it a kind of insight or enlightenment.

Pretty much my belief exactly - interesting that Schleiermacher is a major figure in what is called 'liberal theology'.

Right, so all the processing power of similarity gets re-located to the mind. The external world is just some amorphous deserted blob and it's cut up and structured by the power of the mind. — darthbarracuda

It's in no way saying anything like that. Be serious if you want to understand this stuff rather than responding like you're in a political forum and you want to polemically exaggerate your opponent with the aim of gaining votes/followers. It's not saying that anything is amorphous, "deserted," etc. ALL that it's denying is that there are universals that exist extramentally as abstract existents that particulars then somehow partake of so that the universals are identically instantiated in at least two different particulars.

Re how universals wind up created by our minds, that happens simply because it's necessary for our survival as creatures (with our particular characteristics/requirements) in a world where a lot of stuff can wind up killing us. We need to be able to act and react quickly to(wards) various things we encounter. Creating conceptual abstractions, where we ignore details of difference and instead lump things together as common kinds, allows us to act and react quickly so that we can survive to procreate. Those conceptual abstractions into common kinds are what universals are.

So, instead of a deserted blob, it's a bunch of particulars.

But what is the relationship between particulars such that some particulars are more similar than others. We conceptualize because the world can be conceptualized, because of similarity.

The challenge for nominalism is accounting for similarity without falling back into universals.

..consider how Schleiermacher dealt with the...conundrum--that is, with fact that even if I am a noumenal self, the self as I appear to myself may not be all that similar to what I am in myself. Schleiermacher dealt with this conundrum by privileging a distinct mode of self-consciousness, one in which all attempts to make the self into an object of consciousness—that is, all attempts to come to know the self—are set aside. When the self is made an object of study it becomes a phenomenon, and as such is divorced from the noumenal self. But it is possible to simply be—to become quiescent, if you will, and simply be what one is rather than attempt to know what one is.

And in this place of cognitive stillness, one discovers in a direct experiential way an ultimate reality that cannot be conceptualized or made into an object of study. This is the domain of mystical experience—and even though it is ineffable (that is, even if it cannot be made into an object of knowledge) it brings with it a kind of insight or enlightenment.


Pretty much my belief exactly - interesting that Schleiermacher is a major figure in what is called 'liberal theology'. — Wayfarer

Yes, this seems close to what I mean by spiritual intuition. For the one who has it the truth is without question. There are no rational arguments to be marshalled from that experience, so to persuade others rhetoric is the tool of choice.

I don't know anything much about Schleiermacher and liberal theology.

But the discussion is about universals so we ought not to divert it into mystical theology. I'm interested in what Terrapin Station has to say about it.

Peirce characterized spirit as "disembodied mind," and hence Thirdness; it is real and has being, but (strictly speaking) does not exist. — aletheist


I'm interested in any philosophies that make this kind of distinction. — Wayfarer

Perhaps another way of thinking about the distinction between the real and being and existence is to say that spirit does not have being or existence it is being or existence. But there are always going to be anomalies that emerge within any use of terminology; language is not perfectly consistent it seems.

Fair enough. I don't think appeals to evolution explain anything beyond the metamorphoses of biological forms.

Apo and Streetlight in a similar thread to this months ago said that everything starts off the same, and then because of symmetry breaking and what not early on, things differentiate.

If so, then the question of universals is the wrong question. It's not why things are similar, it's why they're different that needs explaining.

Is that convincing? How would a proponent of universals respond?

I don't see how you can deny universals, and still have physical principles. The point about a physical principle is that it is universally applicable to all kinds of particulars. That is at the very basis of science itself - you have to be able to make predictions, on the basis of principles, that certain outcomes will or won't be observed. So what are those principles, if not universals?

Now, if you think about the way principles 'exist', it might help cast light. Such thing as 'the principle of flammability' (i.e. the ability of a material to catch fire) doesn't exist by itself. You can't go out and observe such a principle as a disembodied or free-floating thing. Yet it is obviously applicable to all kinds of materials, and if you want to create a basic science of fire-lighting, then you classify materials as to whether they're flammable or not; there are substances that catch fire, and those that don't.

Examples of that kind could be multiplied indefinitel. On a more general level again, the very rules that are used to even discuss or explain anything, make use of the basic observations of 'like', 'unlike', 'similar to', and so on. In some ways, then, they are 'the rules of thought'; but if those rules didn't correspond to anything in reality, then no science would be possible, so you can't say they are purely internal to the mind. (Think of the 'synthetic a priori' proposition.)

The defense I gave for universals above in this thread still stands, i.e. that by understanding the relationship of universals and particulars, one is able to arrive at an holistic understanding which unites formal, final and material causes.

Peirce called himself an "extreme scholastic realist" and eventually developed a cosmology that, at least from where I sit, explains both similarity and difference. The hierarchy of Being involves an infinite continuum (Thirdness) of indefinite possibilities (Firstness), only some of which are actualized as determinate individuals (Secondness). The sequence of events in each case consists of spontaneity (Firstness) followed by reaction (Secondness) and then habit-taking (Thirdness). The evolution of states is from complete chaos (Firstness) in the infinite past, through this very process (Thirdness) at any assignable time, to complete regularity (Secondness) in the infinite future.

Beauty, goodness and truth are unanalyzable and so cannot be the subject matters of discursive inquiry, rather they respectively make the different kinds of discursive inquiry associated with them possible and so must simply be presupposed, in my view. — John

I think that Platonic dialectics demonstrate that these things are analyzable. What he did was to analyze the different ways in which each of the different words is used, in an effort to determine the thing referred to by the word.

If so, then the question of universals is the wrong question. It's not why things are similar, it's why they're different that needs explaining. — Marchesk

Yep. But I would really call universals "habits of individuation". So the stress is on being as a process. Universals aren't celestial things - abstracta or Platonic ideals - but names we give to physical regularities or states of constraint. And viewed that way, differentiation becomes much less of an issue. Producing individuated being is simply what a universal process does. Symmetry breaking is the deal itself.

This is why the true "metaphysical-strength" universals would be dynamical principles - a highly general "truth" of any physical action like the least action principle or, indeed, universality (the onset of chaos).

I just happen to have started reading Adrian Bejan's latest popularisation of his constructal theory - The Physics of Life ... http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/05/physics-evolution-life-constructal-law-bejan-ngbooktalk/

So when people talk about universals or ideals, they are normally thinking that every thing has some perfect form - there exists the Platonic cat or coffee mug. Which is of course rather silly. Or they think about the number three or the equilateral triangle.

But these tend to be static conceptions of ideal substances. Catness exists as a eternal essence.

Instead, a modern scientific take on universals (which goes all the way back to Anaximander) would see that we are really talking about the regularities that "must" emerge to regulate any material flow. So we are talking about those deep physical principles like the least action principle - if every path is free to be taken, then even so, a flow will wind up taking the path that is in some measurable sense the most efficient possible way of connecting A to B.

This truly universal way of looking at universals can then be applied to cats and cups as rather more contingent regularities of nature. Cats and cups are still processes - material flows. But they reflect a more specific history of such flows - that is, genetically or culturally constrained flows.

Then mathematical ideals, like numbers and shapes, can be seen as expressions of things like the least action principle.

A perfect triangle is both a broken symmetry in being some particular kind of shape (three cornered polygon), but also "special" in being the most symmetric example of a three cornered polygon. It both reduces triangle-ness to its least effort state - three equal sides producing maximum compactness. And also then stands as the essence, the ideal, against which all other triangles have higher entropy/greater imperfection.

So universals only really start to make physical sense when they are seen as basic dynamical principles - the fundamental rules for organising flows (ie: material symmetry breakings).

And then you can build up from those fundamentals to also explain cats and cups as informationally-constrained material flows. They are genetically or culturally encoded habits of individuation that thus both produce something universal - cats and cups - while also producing those cats and cups in their permissable variety.

Universals aren't celestial things - abstracta or Platonic ideals - but names we give to physical regularities or states of constraint. — apokrisis

But, you can't say that any of the above really explains universals, can you? Were there not such constants as Planck's constant and so on, then there would be no 'symmetry-breaking' in the first place, would there?

I think that Platonic dialectics demonstrate that these things are analyzable. What he did was to analyze the different ways in which each of the different words is used, in an effort to determine the thing referred to by the word. — Metaphysician Undercover

In the part of the passage you quoted from but left out I said pretty much what you said here: that it is not beauty, goodness and truth, but our judgments of them (the ways we use the words) that are analyzable:

I don't think that beauty, goodness and truth are rightly thought of as the "subject matters" of aesthetics, ethics and logic, but as the foundations of those disciplines, whose real subject matters are our judgements of beauty, goodness and truth. — John