Apophaticism is definitely one way of approaching the issue. And it actually makes a lot of sense, especially in the context of later Platonists like Plotinus.

Another word for understanding is seeing. See? — TheMadFool

Absolutely.

The point then is simple: no idea of God one could imagine/conceive of is "not even wrong" (Wolfgang Pauli) No such thing is even a mistake which we could correct to arrive at the truth, the right idea (of God). Apophatic! — TheMadFool

Yes, but does an apophatic conception of God entail any kind of reality or existence at all? Because if not, then God is simply the imagination of something so great that we cannot imagine it. We don't imagine the unimaginable (which would be a contradiction), we imagine that there is an unimaginable. What kind of reality or existence can we imagine the unimaginable to have?

It's a squabble although I think to call it 'intellectual' is flattering it. — Wayfarer

Point. From respect, perhaps....squabble of intellectuals?

I think it's incorrect to say the noumenal realm - numbers and universals - exists, but it is nevertheless real. — Wayfarer

Understood.

Universals, and the like, do not exist, but are real as the constituents of rational thought — Wayfarer

Ditto.
———————-

By immanent I just mean that we have every reason to think there is real difference in the world, real patterns or repetitions, if you like, that would explain our perception of a world teeming with different species. landforms, and elements. — Janus

Fine by me. Immanent refers to that which is possible to experience, guaranteeing distinction from the transcendent. As such “immanent existence” refers to a thing, but does not describe the domain in which it is found.

So I don't say there are real numbers; immaterial platonic objects or ideas, I say that there is real number, shown to us in the diversity of the world of similarities and differences that we perceive. — Janus

I think there may be a problem with your characterizations, because some Platonic immaterial objects are real because they can be empirically represented, but some Platonic immaterial objects are real insofar as we are affected by them. Then it must be the case that empirical diversity and quantitative relations are not sufficient in themselves for describing them.

Anyway, thanks for clearing that up for me.

Immanent refer to that which is possible to experience, guaranteeing distinction from the transcendent. As such “immanent existence” refers to a thing, but does not describe the domain in which it is found. — Mww

Thanks, that is a nice distinction. I think immanent is often confused with 'natural' and 'transcendent' with 'supernatural', which I don't think is helpful. I prefer the sense in which Kant and Husserl characterise the transcendent as 'that which constitutes experience but is not itself given in experience.'

One of my stock references on the subject of intelligible objects is an essay in the Cambridge Companion to Augustine, an excerpt of which can be perused here - points 1, 2 and 3, and the paragraph immediately following. The conclusion that some intelligent objects cannot be corporeal is of particular significance. They don't exist in space and time, but are nevertheless real.

I think there may be a problem with your characterizations, because some Platonic immaterial objects are real because they can be empirically represented, but some Platonic immaterial objects are real insofar as we are affected by them. Then it must be the case that empirical diversity and quantitative relations are not sufficient in themselves or describing them. — Mww

We are discussing number which can be understood as being necessarily instantiated in diversity. If you are thinking about the so-called platonic forms of objects, like for example the form of the horse; we can be affected by the empirical form of a horse or the imagined form of a horse. When it comes to a number, say five, we can be affected by the empirical form of five, five apples for example, or we can be affected by thinking about five. When it comes to the form of the good, we can be affected by an empirical form of the good, a good action for example, or we can be affected by thinking about the good. There are diverse instances of horses, instantiation of five and examples of the good, so I'm not seeing the difference you are attempting to refer to?

but some Platonic immaterial objects are real insofar as we are affected by them. — Mww

This is an important point, as it implies that the immaterial has causal power over us, as material beings. So even if we take a materialist or physicalist perspective, which see the human being as a physical body, we have to provide the metaphysics required to account for this fact, that the immaterial has causal power over the material body.

We are discussing number which can be understood as being necessarily instantiated in diversity. If you are thinking about the so-called platonic forms of objects, like for example the form of the horse; we can be affected by the empirical form of a horse or the imagined form of a horse. When it comes to a number, say five, we can be affected by the empirical form of five, five apples for example, or we can be affected by thinking about five. When it comes to the form of the good, we can be affected by an empirical form of the good, a good action for example, or we can be affected by thinking about the good. There are diverse instances of horses, instantiation of five and examples of the good, so I'm not seeing the difference you are attempting to refer to? — Janus

Suppose you are hungry, and you move toward getting something to eat. You are affected by this immaterial idea, to get something to eat. It has causal power over your material body. The immaterial ideas of numbers have a very similar causal power over you. For example, if you have a thousand dollars in your bank account, and you need twelve hundred for your rent payment tomorrow, you will be moved toward getting another two hundred into your account. These numbers have causal power over your material body.

For example, if you have a thousand dollars in your bank account, and you need twelve hundred for your rent payment tomorrow, you will be moved toward getting another two hundred into your account. These numbers have causal power over your material body. — Metaphysician Undercover

In terms theologian Bernard Lonergan develops in his major work Insight, Krauss is caught in a notion of reality as "already-out-there-now," a reality conditioned by space and time. Lonergan refers to this conception of reality as based on an "animal" knowing, on extroverted biologically dominated consciousness. He distinguishes it from a fully human knowing based on intelligence and reason, arguing that many philosophical difficulties arise because of a failure to distinguish between these two forms of knowing. ...

It goes without saying that you cannot prove the existence of God to a materialist without first converting the materialist away from materialism. ...If we think of the real as an "already-out-there-now" real of extroverted consciousness, then God is not real. God becomes just a figment of the imagination, a fairy at the bottom of the garden, an invisible friend. However, if the real is constituted by intelligent grasp and reasonable affirmation, then reality suddenly becomes much richer, and the God-question takes on a different hue.

But it is not just the God-question that we can now begin to address more coherently. There are a whole range of other realities whose reality we can now affirm: interest rates, mortgages, contracts, vows, national constitutions, penal codes and so on. Where do interest rates "exist"? Not in banks, or financial institutions. Are they real when we cannot touch them or see them? We all spend so much time worrying about them - are we worrying about nothing? In fact, I'm sure we all worry much more about interest rates than about the existence or non-existence of the Higgs boson! Similarly, a contract is not just the piece of paper, but the meaning the paper embodies; likewise a national constitution or a penal code.

Once we break the stranglehold on our thinking by our animal extroversion, we can affirm the reality of our whole world of human meanings and values, of institutions, nations, finance and law, of human relationships and so on, without the necessity of seeing them as "just" something else lower down the chain of being yet to be determined. — Neil Ormerod, The Metaphysical Muddle of Lawrence Krauss

The problem with these discussions, as with so many in this forum, is that they are so abstract, and use abstruse and abstract terms, like immanent and apophatic, and instantiated, and dyad, and empiricism, and quantitative relations, and on and on ad nauseum. Y’all remind me of the scientists on Swifts Flying Island, who can’t eat their food unless it is cut into geometric shapes, and want to understand a woman’s breast by observing its nipple under a microscope.

Philosophy is not grazing, or picking and choosing from, the various arguments and reasonings or aphorisms of the philosophic traditions. Rather it is delving into the history, the stories of great men of the past and their deeds. We cannot understand Socrates’ higher intellectual notions of the forms until we have understood his relation to Aristophanes, the “wise guy” as opposed to the “wise man.” Aristophanes wrote plays that, though conveying wisdom, had to have popular appeal in order to gain success. Socrates, on the other hand, was not popular, and had no incentive to appeal to popularity. Indeed, his motivation was an appeal to a very few who he hoped might become true companions in his search for the truth.

For example, to understand logic, we needn’t analyze sets and subsets, etc, in the abstract way it is presented in textbooks. We only need contemplate Themistocles’ answer to the Seriphian, who said to him, “It is not due to your own merit, but because you are an Athenian, that you are famous,” to which Themistocles replied, “I, had I been Serphian, would have made no name for myself; and you, had you been Athenian, would have made no name for yourself neither.”

Hey it's not a grad school symposium, it's a public internet forum, and, I think, one of the better ones of its kind. I often don't agree with what others say, but I generally don't have too much trouble understanding them. (Generally. There are exceptions.)

Furthermore in this Internet age, it is a fact of life that one can peruse, graze, click through, all kinds of content, extracts, bits of books, video media, interviews, and try and extract juicy morsels from them. The mainstream alternative is often so specialised as to be incomprehensible to anyone but other specialists. We're trying to make sense of philosophical ideas - well, I am, anyway - in such a way that they actually mean something in my non-academic and certainly-less-than-idealised existence.

Yes, but does an apophatic conception of God entail any kind of reality or existence at all? Because if not, then God is simply the imagination of something so great that we cannot imagine it. We don't imagine the unimaginable (which would be a contradiction), we imagine that there is an unimaginable. What kind of reality or existence can we imagine the unimaginable to have? — Janus

To make sense of apophatic theology (knowing by not knowing :chin: ), one has to understand that whatever it is that we're denying predicates of our world to, God, is beyond our comprehension, our comprehension being limited to those predicates I mentioned earlier.

As for contradictions, yes, as I said: knowing by not knowing. We don't know what God is but we know what God is not! Knowing almost always is in the positive e.g. I know about apples when I know what apples are and I wouldn't really claim such a thing if all I know about apples is what apples are not. Thus to assert God in terms of negation of all known predicates is to actually not to know God but then apophatic theology is touted as a way of knowing God.

As for 'apophatic', here's a useful primer. Another here.

I'm well familiar with what apophatic theology is purported to consist in by at least two of its advocates, Jean Luc Marion and John Caputo, both of whom I have read.

The problem I see with saying that God is not anything you can think of, is that it follows that God is therefore...not anything at all.

The problem I see with saying that God is not anything you can think of, is that it follows that God is therefore...not anything. — Janus

How? A well-crafted argument would go a long way towards making your case. Remember there are two points to consider: relative limit (what we can say/think) and absolute limit (what can be said/thought).

We can think that there's an x that we can't think of but that doesn't mean we can think of x.

How? A well-crafted argument would go a long way towards making your case. Remember there are two points to consider: relative limit (what we can say/think) and absolute limit (what can be said/thought).

We can think that there's an x that we can't think of but that doesn't mean we can think of x. — TheMadFool

If we think of God in apophatic terms as being nothing we can think of, then it follows that we cannot think of God even as being, since being is something we can think of. The same goes for the idea that God does not exist, but is real; that claim, when I think about it, makes no sense. What is the sense in saying that something is real and yet non-existent?

So,what is the point of saying God is real, if we cannot say what it means to say that God is real? In this then we are talking about feelings, not about thoughts. If we believe in God er "feel" that God is real. But that God is real is a proposition and it seems strange to say that we feel rather than think a proposition.

So, really if we have a feeling for God, then we should, I think, just focus on that feeling of sacredness, devotion, mystery or awe and forget about trying to say anything propositional at all We can speak in poetic language, evoking our feelings and intimations, without proposing anything or concerning ourselves with knowing anything. Otherwise we will just talk nonsense while imagining that we are saying something sensible; the first step towards fundamentalism.That's my take anyway.

Hey it's not a grad school symposium, it's a public internet forum, and, I think, one of the better ones of its kind. I often don't agree with what others say, but I generally don't have too much trouble understanding them. — Wayfarer

Well, I graduated from Podunksville University myself, and we didn’t use big words like epistemology and ontology and such; we talked about the everyday things we had no personal experience of, like gentlemen and cities...

...”Strauss merges with the authors he discussed and can be understood to be nothing more than their interpreter. Moreover, while philosophers today speak only of being and knowledge, Strauss spoke of cities and gentlemen.”

Furthermore in this Internet age, it is a fact of life that one can peruse, graze, click through, all kinds of content, extracts, bits of books, video media, interviews, and try and extract juicy morsels from them. — Wayfarer

At Podunksville U., we didn’t eat at a buffet, wandering over a dizzying array of tasty delectables and picking a little bit of this, a little of that hoping something would excite our jaded tastebuds. We went to the mess hall, where we were all fed the same damn cornbread and pintos, green beans and taters...it wasn’t very exciting, but it filled our bellies, and didn’t distract from solid study...like grazing a buffet would have.

We're trying to make sense of philosophical ideas - well, I am, anyway - in such a way that they actually mean something in my non-academic and certainly-less-than-idealised existence. — Wayfarer

At P.U. we were always taught things that actually meant something to us too, like this letter of Seneca’s: “Nectimus nodos et ambiguam significationem verbis inligamus ac deinde dissolvimus: tantum nobis vacat? iam vivere, iam mori scimus? Tota illo mente pergendum est ubi provideri debet ne res nos, non verba decipiant...Res fallunt: illas discerne. Pro bonis mala amplectimur; optamus contra id quod optavimus; pugnant vota nostra cum votis, consilia cum consiliis. Adulatio quam similis est amicitiae!...Venit ad me pro amico blandus inimicus; vitia nobis sub virtutum nomine obrepunt: temeritas sub titulo fortitudinis latet, moderatio vocatur ignavia, pro cauto timidus accipitur. In his magno periculo erramus: his certas notas imprime...”

I won’t bother to translate this, since I’m sure you can find, in a Google search on the internet buffet, a better translation than I could produce, if you are interested enough to go to the trouble.

Well, it is a public forum, like I said. A place to discuss ideas. It's fairly free-form, but I enjoy it, and learn quite a lot from it.

If we think of God in apophatic terms as being nothing we can think of, then it follows that we cannot think of God even as being, since being is something we can think of. The same goes for the idea that God does not exist, but is real; that claim, when I think about it, makes no sense. What is the sense in saying that something is real and yet non-existent? — Janus

And thus :point:

I'm not convinced that the idea of an immaterial being seems outlandish at all to many or most of those who haven't thought about it much (which is not say I think it necessarily should seem outlandish to have thought about it a lot)..

Naively, many of us seem to imagine ourselves as immaterial beings who "have" or "inhabit" the body.
— Janus

The immaterial, speculatively is perfectly normal of course but once you try to prove it, you begin to realize how crazy the idea is. — TheMadFool

To imagine the immaterial is nearly as nonsensical (to you) as to conceive of the inconceivable and I feel the two are related, like Cantor's infinities, one bigger than the other.

To imagine the immaterial is nearly as nonsensical (to you) as to conceive of the inconceivable and I feel the two are related, like Cantor's infinities, one bigger than the other. — TheMadFool

Do you "feel" that the "two are related" or think it? :wink: The difference with Cantor's idea that infinities can be larger or smaller is this can be shown logically, so I don't think the analogy is really appropriate.

Do you "feel" that the "two are related" or think it? :wink: The difference with Cantor's idea that infinities can be larger or smaller is this can be shown logically, so I don't think the analogy is really appropriate — Janus

Well, if you fail to see the connection it isn't my fault is it?

There are diverse instances of horses, instantiation of five and examples of the good, so I'm not seeing the difference you are attempting to refer to? — Janus

I have to keep this short, in that this is a thread concerned with Greek philosophy, of which I am rather less than proficient. When I say we are affected by immaterial objects, I mean to indicate, on the one hand rationally by feelings, and on the other epistemically by the categories. Of the former we are immediately conscious, of the latter we are not. The former is given, the latter must be synthetically derived.

The argument ensues from the notion that the common understanding overlooks that when we speak of A number, or THE horse, or SOME good, and also irrespective of the extent of the series of any of those, there must be that which underpins each instance or series thereof. You hinted at it when you said “we are discussing number”, but then you went on to give an example with A number. Exhibition of an empirical example cannot ground the validity of immaterial objects, re: it doesn’t mean anything to discuss number by invoking five, because any congruent representation would be sufficient, and any example of anything is always reducible to that which it is an example of.

But I don’t think I’m telling you anything you didn’t already know. I’m just offering an exposition of what I meant by being affected.
————-

I prefer the sense in which Kant and Husserl characterise the transcendent as 'that which constitutes experience but is not itself given in experience.' — Wayfarer

I would never be so presumptuous as to impinge on your preferences, but I wonder if you might want to re-think that. Or, to be fair, show me why I should.

but some Platonic immaterial objects are real insofar as we are affected by them.
— Mww

This is an important point, as it implies that the immaterial has causal power over us — Metaphysician Undercover

Which illustrates with perfect clarity, that the principle of cause and effect is not necessarily bounded by phenomenal constituency. The misunderstanding of which the Renaissance empiricists incorporating the newly-founded scientific method generally were guilty, and subsequent Enlightenment metaphysics remedied, even while maintaining that very same method.

I would never be so presumptuous as to impinge on your preferences, but I wonder if you might want to re-think that. Or, to be fair, show me why I should. — Mww

'A transcendental argument is a deductive philosophical argument which takes a manifest feature of experience as granted, and articulates what must be the case so that such experiences are possible.'

Is that an untrue statement?

No. This is true.

Look closer. Your other one is......different.

Well, if you fail to see the connection it isn't my fault is it? — TheMadFool

If you fail to explain the connection you think you see. or address the difference I noted, in a convincing way, it isn't my fault is it?

Edit: I apologize, I misread you. I thought you were saying something else: and I think see what you were getting at now. :up:

OK then, I stand corrected. Will bear that in mind.

“...Thus transcendental and transcendent are not identical terms....”
(A296/B353)

Not to let a silly -al ruin a good acquaintance.

Aha! NOW I see what you were getting at. (Just being polite before.)

I have to keep this short, in that this is a thread concerned with Greek philosophy, of which I am rather less than proficient. When I say we are affected by immaterial objects, I mean to indicate, on the one hand rationally by feelings, and on the other epistemically by the categories. Of the former we are immediately conscious, of the latter we are not. The former is given, the latter must be synthetically derived. — Mww

It's interesting that you say we are affected rationally by feelings. Generally being affected by feelings is considered as being irrationally affected. In my experience feelings are manifested bodily. I'm going to have to think some more on that.

I think I get what you mean by saying that we are affected epistemically by the categories; without categories we could not know anything. I understand categories as being abstracted from perceived differences of material and form, so I think of them rather as material than immaterial.

You hinted at it when you said “we are discussing number”, but then you went on to give an example with A number. Exhibition of an empirical example cannot ground the validity of immaterial objects, re: it doesn’t mean anything to discuss number by invoking five, because any congruent representation would be sufficient, and any example of anything is always reducible to that which it is an example of. — Mww

Are you saying that one example of say five objects cannot ground our understanding of number? If so, I would say that I wasn't suggesting that it could, but on the other hand any example of a number of objects exemplifies the same properties as any other example of that number of objects. I mean we can literally divide, for example any six objects (that are small enough to move around that is) into six separate units, two groups of three or three groups of two. Or we can have one alone and the other five separate, or a group of two and a group of four. So all the abstract attributes of the number six can be perceptually shown.

When it comes to numbers that are too large to allow us to play around with that number of objects, then we would have to designate single objects to stand for multiples, and so on. It pays to remember that calculation used to be done on an abacus, which is a very material way of showing arithmetical operations.

Hopefully I'm not misunderstanding you and addressing something you weren't talking about.

I think a very broad argument can be built along the lines that whenever you assert that something is 'the same as' or 'different from' or 'greater than' or 'less than' something else, then you're relying on understanding the intelligible properties of the objects in question to make that assertion. Such an ability is fundamental to the laws of logic, language, and mathematics alike. These abilities must be 'brought to' experience in order to make an argument of any kind. So how can they be 'derived from' experience? Nothing of the kind can be derived from experience without already possessing these abilities, which are innate to the intellect. However, 'for empiricism there is no essential difference between the intellect and the senses. The fact which obliges a correct theory of knowledge to recognize this essential difference is simply disregarded. What fact? The fact that the human intellect grasps, first in a most indeterminate manner, then more and more distinctly, certain sets of intelligible features -- that is, natures, say, the human nature -- which exist in the real as identical with individuals,...but which are universal in the mind and presented to it as universal objects, positively one (within the mind) and common to an infinity of singular things (in the real).

Thanks to the association of particular images and recollections, a dog reacts in a similar manner to the similar particular impressions his eyes or his nose receive from this thing we call a piece of sugar or this thing we call an intruder; he does not know what is sugar or what is intruder. He plays, he lives in his affective and motor functions, or rather he is put into motion by the similarities which exist between things of the same kind; he does not see the similarity, the common features as such. What is lacking is the flash of intelligibility; he has no ear for the intelligible meaning. He has not the idea or the concept of the thing he knows, that is, from which he receives sensory impressions; his knowledge remains immersed in the subjectivity of his own feelings -- only in man, with the universal idea, does knowledge achieve objectivity. And the dog's field of knowledge is strictly limited: only the universal idea sets free -- in man -- the potential infinity of knowledge.

Such are the basic facts which Empiricism ignores, and in the disregard of which it undertakes to philosophize.' (Maritain)

Well put.

It's extraordinary that we imbue the "external world" with so many things. Properties, qualities, substances, richness, depth and on and on and on. It's devilishly difficult to think away what remains of objects once you take away what you put in them.

I'm not speaking of "atoms or fields remain", I'm thinking of an ordinary sized object, such as a statue or a tree.

It is a total mystery to me. And that's "only" the external world. The "world" inside is a whole other issue. What with the infinite amount of ideas a person can have, many of which share virtually nothing of what can be called effects from the objects outside us.