If one wants to discuss ideas, it may not matter whether this is or is not what a particular philosopher means. — Fooloso4

Well said. As you probably know, Kojeve's Hegel was more influential in a certain context than Hegel's Hegel might have been. Often the great names are used as avatars or masks, sometimes for laudable reasons perhaps (modesty?) but sometimes in what might be called a transference. To me some kind of rhetorical battle for status is at the center, but I think there's also something noble and genuine at the center. It's not just ego. In the same way, I think natural scientists sometimes forget themselves in their work, even if they also often enjoy the fantasy of a certain kind of recognition.

What may surprise some is that Leo Strauss sent some of his best students to study with Kojeve. They are very different but found common ground.

Sometimes names are used to give weight and authority to arguments that won't stand on their own

Heidegger is one of those valuable philosophers who destabilize our complacent sense that we know what we are talking about when we babble on about being and logic and truth quasimechanically. — green flag

I see and accept the truth of what you say above. I don't oppose Heidegger; that fresh thinking requires neologisms is also something I accept without complaint.

However, if someone pushes beyond the scope of the common grammar, they should be at pains to surround the new expression with an explanatory text that clarifies the new meaning.

A blunt declaration to the effect: "existence is not a predicate" stops short of doing the work of necessary persuasion from conventional wisdom to new understanding. On the other hand, legitimate participation in this conversation presupposes adequate grounding in the pertinent fundamentals. It now seems apparent my grounding is deficient.

Sometimes names are used to give weight and authority to arguments that won't stand on their own — Fooloso4

:up:

Also, I think Kojeve is great.

they should be at pains to surround the new expression with an explanatory text that clarifies the new meaning. — ucarr

I agree. That's why I suggested googling the phrase, thinking you'd find this:

Being is evidently not a real predicate, that is, a conception of something which is added to the conception of some other thing. It is merely the positing of a thing, or of certain determinations in it. ...

A hundred real dollars contain no more than a hundred possible dollars. For, as the latter indicate the conception, and the former the object, on the supposition that the content of the former was greater than that of the latter, my conception would not be an expression of the whole object, and would consequently be an inadequate conception of it. But in reckoning my wealth there may be said to be more in a hundred real dollars than in a hundred possible dollars—that is, in the mere conception of them...

https://philosophy.lander.edu/intro/articles/kantexistence-a.pdf

Note that that's Kant, not Heidegger. We have arrived relatively late to this conversation about existence. In case it's not clear, I don't personally take Kant or Heidegger or anyone as an authority on the matter. I do think Heidegger writes thousands of words to explain himself. Personally I think his early writing on death is unclear, possibly because he wasn't exactly sure just how it connected to his other central ideas.

On the other hand, legitimate participation in this conversation presupposes adequate grounding in the pertinent fundamentals. It now seems apparent my grounding is deficient. — ucarr

That kind of humility is laudable and rare. As I see it, we have to take the risk and talk it out.

The big picture is that I embrace something akin perhaps to 'will to power', with God or the gods as an image of what we'd like to be. In Hobbes, kings cannot stop conquering, even when sated, because their satiety must be made secure. The will wills itself, more power and freedom, but for what ? An indestructible orgy of narcissism ? — green flag

This sounds like more of a traditional notion of power than a Nierzschean one. As Foucault conceives it, “power is not something that is acquired, seized, or shared, some­thing that one holds on to or allows to slip away”. It is instead something that flows though subjects in a community. Power is not possessed by a dominant agent, nor located in that agent’s relations to those dominated, but is instead distributed throughout complex social net­works.”

This sounds like more of a traditional notion of power than a Nierzschean one. — Joshs

Perhaps. But I'm digging for the biological roots of this theological power talk. The king who must expand is a metaphor for a dialectic that must neutralize and absorb its critics as mere stages along the way to the birth of the god (or of the god's self-recognition.) In other words, Hegel must ingest (or convince himself and others that he can ingest) Schlegelian irony. A system is a crystal castle. It's perhaps a avatar of the self that hopes to survive the fate of all meat. [These days, the 'single philosopher' or culture system faces the heat death as the closing of this partial escape hatch -- and perhaps as a relief in terms of a welcome lightness of being.]

"...on this principle, I live as an artist when all my action and my expression in general, in connection with any content whatever, remains for me a mere show and assumes a shape which is wholly in my power. In that case I am not really in earnest either with this content or, generally, with its expression and actualization. For genuine earnestness enters only by means of a substantial interest, something of intrinsic worth like truth, ethical life, etc., – by means of a content which counts as such for me as essential, so that I only become essential myself in my own eyes in so far as I have immersed myself in such a content and have brought myself into conformity with it in all my knowing and acting. When the ego that sets up and dissolves everything out of its own caprice is the artist, to whom no content of consciousness appears as absolute and independently real but only as a self-made and destructible show, such earnestness can find no place, since validity is ascribed only to the formalism of the ego."
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ae/introduction.htm#s7-3

One can imagine an ironical-mystical-joking artist creating Hegel as a character in a play, but one can imagine the reverse, too.

I don't mean narcissism pejoratively but neutrally. There are many pleasures, among which there is the sweet sense of being at or near the center or on the peak. In short, distinction and difference and distance.

As I see it, we have to take the risk and talk it out. — green flag

And, proceeding from that welcome note of optimism and generosity, let me ask you, regarding,

In ““Section IV. Of the Impossibility of an Ontological Proof of the Existence of God,””1 drawn from his Critique, Kant addresses the logical problem of existential import. How do we talk or think about things without supposing, in some sense at least, that they exist? Bertrand Russell expressed one aspect of the problem this way: If it’s false that the present King of France is bald, then why doesn’t this fact imply that it’s true the present King of France is not bald? When the existence of the subjects of our statements are in question, the normal use of logic becomes unreliable. Kant argues that the use of words (or “predicates”) alone does not necessarily imply the existence of their referents. We can only assume the existence of entities named by our words; we cannot prove “existence” by means of the use of language alone.
— Immanuel Kant

https://philosophy.lander.edu/intro/articles/kantexistence-a.pdf

As I see it, he begins by claiming a predicate is an elaboration of a truth pertaining to something whereas a claim of the "being" of something is merely a supposition in abstraction.

A predicate elaborates additional dimensionality to an actually existing thing. A declaration affirming the existence of a thing does not elaborate its dimensionality beyond its already established phenomenal_empirical attributes.

I don't see how correctly denying the phenomenal_empirical reality of existence claims - on the basis of no additional elaboration of dimensionality - leads to correctly denying the "being" of things verified by phenomenal_empirical observation.

I think we can have fun examining some ramifications of Kant's claim predication of existence of a thing adds nothing to its established attributes.. That general being has a { }, viz., empty set relationship with individual beings shows promise of being interesting. For example, we can start with the concomitant claim that being-ness as an empty set is a member of the individual set of every existing thing.

Does this lead to claiming that we can use the John von Neumann technique for propagating all numbers from the empty set in a parallel that propagates all existing things from being-ness-as-the-empty set? That infinite recursion generates conceptually all existing things from being-ness-as-the-empty set feels right.

Maybe that's what Nietzsche's getting at with his infinite return.

It's hard to reply to your individual questions when for me the issue (not yours but ours as humans) is semantic. One might be tempted to say that the imaginary money lacks a being which is 'physical.' One might claim that to 'really' exist is to 'physically' exist. But for me this strategy remains unwittingly semantically challenged.

Before I talk about Saussure's structuralism, here's the mathematical version, which might especially speak to you:

"Benacerraf argues, in particular, that the natural numbers should not be identified with any set-theoretic objects; in fact, they should not be taken to be objects at all. Instead, numbers should be treated as “positions in structures”, e.g., in “the natural number structure”, “the real number structure”, etc. All that matters about such positions are their structural properties, i.e., those “stem[ming] from the relations they bear to one another in virtue of being arranged in a progression” (1965: 70), as opposed to further set-theoretic properties of the von Neumann ordinals, Dedekind cuts, etc. What we study and try to characterize in modern mathematics, along such lines, are the corresponding “abstract structures”. It is in this sense that Benacerraf suggests a structuralist position concerning mathematics." https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/structuralism-mathematics/

In other words, '2' doesn't refer to anything, unless it be a role in a system of relationships. In non-math context, I'm interested in the structural(-ist) limitations on the reduction of ambiguity. I think Saussure is basically right that our language is a system of differences without positive terms. 'Physical' is not some label on an immediately available concept which is given to each human soul directly, as if every human had an 'inner eye' that gazed on the same gleaming eternal Form. It's different from 'non-physical.' We don't know exactly what we mean by either term, but we know that you use one or the other, not both (it's like 1 bit of resolution or information or distinction and that's all, though this metaphor has its limits.)

Here's Aristotle: "Spoken words are the symbols of mental experience and written words are the symbols of spoken words. Just as all men have not the same writing, so all men have not the same speech sounds, but the mental experiences, which these directly symbolize, are the same for all, as also are those things of which our experiences are the images." http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/interpretation.1.1.html

Wittgenstein's 'beetle in the box' example demonstrates the confusion in this otherwise appealing and familiar conception of our situation. Although wrong, it's so 'obvious' that no case is made for the assumption.

So that's some background thats meant to gesture at the difficultly of knowing what we are talking about. A second approach is a metaphor. Being is the light that makes beings visible. That's not my invention. It's that things are rather than how they are. Tautological ? Maybe. Is the point to feel the terror and wonder of a tautology ? There are passages in Wittgenstein that suggest this sort of thing. If one tries to say it, it's as if one is saying nothing, merely uttering a whimper or a sigh.

In case it helps understands where I'm coming from, anyway, here are some de Saussure quotes:
****************
The ultimate law of language is, dare we say, that nothing can ever reside in a single term. This is a direct consequence of the fact that linguistic signs are unrelated to what they designate and that, therefore, 'a' cannot designate anything without the the aid of 'b' and vice versa, or, in other words, that both have value only by the difference between them.

Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula.

Psychologically our thought-apart from its expression in words-is only a shapeless and indistinct mass.

Psychologically our thought-apart from its expression in words-is only a shapeless and indistinct mass. — green flag

All I get from this assertion is a desire to say "speak for yourself".

... What I had in mind was the self-reflexivity of becoming as difference rather than identity. What returns to itself is always an utterly new and different meaning. There is nothing evolutionary or cumulative in this self-reflexive unfolding, no aim or goal. The self is remade in every repetition ,,. — Joshs

How about the continuity of our experience? You can't be conscious of change or novelty if you don't have a "feel" of sameness in the experience. If the experience is an aggregate or a series of exclusively "new" moments it resembles more like a constant series of separate shocks following each other. Aren't there any inner tendencies, formations in our experience? I mean if we are already "embedded" in relatively static "objective" structures which form our experiences (these are there given like a grammar). Within these structures there appear various possibilities or directions which we can try to decide to follow.

Is it all just opinion? Maybe, since most philosophical assertions cannot be empirically tested.

My own experience of thinking seems to show me that thought without language is not a shapeless and indistinct mass. Could I be wrong about that? Maybe, but how could that be demonstrated and what could it even mean for me to wrong about that?

I'm convinced that humans are diverse in any case and that blanket statements about the relation between thought and language are misbegotten. But, as you say, that's just my opinion, right?

How about the continuity of our experience? You can't be conscious of change or novelty if you don't have a "feel" of sameness in the experience. If the experience is an aggregate or a series of "new" moments it resembles more like a constant series of separate shocks following each other. — waarala

Memory is always in play. Perhaps the sense of "continuity" in our experience is on account of a story we are constantly telling ourselves, choosing the aspects of experience that we can make coherent and consistent with what we remember from previous experience.

If some experience cannot be rendered consonant then we have cognitive dissonance. The other unifying aspect seems to be the basic feeling of embodiment.

My own experience of thinking seems to show me that thought without language is not a shapeless and indistinct mass. — Janus

Spatial thinking supports this. From geometry, to rearranging the furniture, to packing the car, to getting from one place to another.

I once read somewhere that a geometrical figure, with the words "Look at this", serves as a proof for certain Indian mathematicians.

(Wittgenstein, Zettel 461)

How about the continuity of our experience? You can't be conscious of change or novelty if you don't have a "feel" of sameness in the experience — waarala

Husserl’s solution ( which was also William James’) was to argue that the present moment is ‘specious’. That is , it includes retentions and protentions (expectations). One could not hear a melody as a melody if all that one was aware of was individual notes in an isolated and punctual ‘now’. Husserl asserted that the just prior note is retained alongside the now itself. This provides us with the sense of continuity. In addition, the new always shades an element of similarity with what preceded it.

“Even the physical things of this world that are unknown to us are, to speak generally, known in respect of their type. We have already seen like things before, though not precisely this thing here. Thus each everyday experience involves an analogizing transfer of an originally instituted objective sense to a new case, with its anticipative apprehension of the object as having a similar sense. To the extent that there is givenness beforehand, there is such a transfer.“ (Cartesian Meditations, p.111)

My own experience of thinking seems to show me that thought without language is not a shapeless and indistinct mass. Could I be wrong about that? — Janus

I think the way to understand Saussure is not to compare thinking-without-speaking to speaking now that you already have the sign system. Instead you should imagine a baby assimilating a sign system, expanding its vocabulary. (Not much can be said or proven, I agree, about "in my head" stuff, and that itself is "structuralist." The role of a certain kind of mentalistic language is inferential in just this way (as the kind of thing that 'only I can see.')

Does a baby understand the concept of a hermeneutic circle and merely need to learn the convention sign attached to this unmediated biologically hardwired or telepathically accessed Form ? Or does the world indeed become more conceptually complex and differentiated as it learns how to use more and more signs ? Does the entire tribe become more sophisticated as it extends its vocabulary to include more and more metacognitive terms ?

FWIW, I agree that there's some kind of thinking without language.

But is this the ideal response to the invocation of structuralism ? Roy Harris wrote a book about how Wittgenstein and Saussure complement one another, both speaking against the default notion that words are merely labels for pre-given independent immaterial concepts common to all humans. I'd say that 'of course' Saussure exaggerates here or simplifies there, but need it really be said that such is the fate of all theory ? The original context of the invocation of structuralism was the discussion of what meaning, if any, could be given to what it means to be or exist. If structuralism is largely correct, then there is something like a limit to the reduction of ambiguity, because we are not selecting this or that shard from the chandelier of the divine and eternal logos.

Within these structures there appear various possibilities or directions which we can try to decide to follow. — waarala

:up:

Husserl asserted that the just prior note is retained alongside the now itself. — Joshs

There's clearly something like retention, but did he really limit it to the just prior note ? I'd think there would be no 'natural' or obvious place to draw the line.

There's clearly something like retention, but did he really limit it to the just prior note ? I'd think there would be no 'natural' or obvious place to draw the line. — green flag

There isn’t a line, but a horizon of retentions of retentions trailing off into the receding past. It quickly gets really complicated.

It quickly gets really complicated. — Joshs

Sounds like it. I was looking more into Husserl lately, and I got the impression that his massive output is tangled indeed. There are lots of concepts that I have grasped from it and find valuable. Then some of the later lifeworld stuff seems Heidegger-influenced or an attempt to cover the same ground in a more Husserlian way.

Husserl’s solution ( which was also William James’) was to argue that the present moment is ‘specious’. That is , it includes retentions and protentions (expectations). One could not hear a melody as a melody if all that one was aware of was individual notes in an isolated and punctual ‘now’. Husserl asserted that the just prior note is retained alongside the now itself. This provides us with the sense of continuity. In addition, the new always shades an element of similarity with what preceded it ... — Joshs

Quite so, but I got the impression that your thoughts represented something else than this Husserlian-Jamesian view. You are probably specifically emphasizing the differences. Or: that the most basic identity is actually merely the formal identity of temporal experience. For Husserl the retention-protention -scheme was a formal description of time i.e. it was not anything psychological or empirical. I think that Heidegger is differing here from Husserl.

For Husserl the retention-protention -scheme was a formal description of time i.e. it was not anything psychological or empirical. I think that Heidegger is differing here from — waarala

Heidegger’s model of temporality differs from Husserl’s by getting rid of the transcendental ego, among other things. But like Husserl’s, it is neither psychological nor empirical.

↪ucarr

In order not to repeat myself over and over, I will say it one more time and move on. Being or "beingess" is not an attribute of what is. Something must be in order to have attributes. — Fooloso4

Being is evidently not a real predicate, that is, a conception of something which is added to the conception of some other thing. It is merely the positing of a thing, or of certain determinations in it. ...

A hundred real dollars contain no more than a hundred possible dollars. For, as the latter indicate the conception, and the former the object, on the supposition that the content of the former was greater than that of the latter, my conception would not be an expression of the whole object, and would consequently be an inadequate conception of it. But in reckoning my wealth there may be said to be more in a hundred real dollars than in a hundred possible dollars—that is, in the mere conception of them...[/] — green flag

You imply, as per the Kant quote, being-in-general, because it further elaborates no dimensionality of beings-specific, has no countable being and thus, weirdly, being-in-general has no being.*

*Beyond being a tautology, this is a paradox. Many think paradox a theorem killer.

I dispute this logic by claiming being-in-general, like the empty set, is a member of every being-specific and, moreover, being-in-general, like the empty set, is countable via unbounded recursion to all beings-specific and thus being-in-general, beyond being a countable attribute of every being-specific, stands existentially as the countable attribute of general-beingness, an insuperable medium.

It is the insuperability of general-beingness that makes it appear as if it adds no further elaboration to beings-specific and is thus uncountable. The problem here is confusing uncountable with insuperable such that insuperable appears as nothingness. On the contrary, because being-in-general always encompasses the totality of every being-specific, in the effort to add it as a countable attribute, it appears as a nothing because counting being-in-general presupposes the totality of a being-specific due to its insuperability as a medium for the expression of the specific beingness of the specific being.

In short, the totality of being-in-general added to being-specific is a false nothingness.

Memory is always in play. Perhaps the sense of "continuity" in our experience is on account of a story we are constantly telling ourselves, choosing the aspects of experience that we can make coherent and consistent with what we remember from previous experience. — Janus

Yes, but we can't explain the continuity with the mechanism of our personal memory alone (if at all). We move or act in various already as coherent understood situations which engender us to "see" or recognize its different aspects. We can't produce the world from our inner memory.

Hi. I don't think you are grasping my point. Definition is a blurry-go-round. Look up a word in the dictionary and all you get is more words, which are themselves defined in terms of yet more words. There is nothing that staples this system of references to something outside it. I'm not saying that we can't intend the spoon in the bowl but I am saying that explaining this intending is itself caught up in the same blurry-go-round, a matter of offering yet more signs.

The system of signs that can only mean their differences from one another floats rootless above an abyss. So saying something like 'being is countable' or 'being is time' is just leaping from stone to stone. If I say that being is the light that discloses beings, then I'm offering poetry which at least has the virtue of being obviously poetry, as opposed to a more typical and tempting 'white mythology' (Derrida) --- which pretends to a divine / transcendent literality offers finally the otherwise secret name of God.

:up: An interesting quote from Wittgenstein; not quite sure what the implications there are.

I think the way to understand Saussure is not to compare thinking-without-speaking to speaking now that you already have the sign system. Instead you should imagine a baby assimilating a sign system, expanding its vocabulary. — green flag

It's not clear to me what you are saying here. My point was only that it is possible to think without symbolic language but in images, and that such thinking is not a "shapeless and indistinct mass".

Or does the world indeed become more conceptually complex and differentiated as it learns how to use more and more signs ?

Every new observation and imagination increases the complexity of the experience and understanding of the human world. Of course I am not denying that the young are inducted into this human world in part at least by symbolic language.

Yes, but we can't explain the continuity with the mechanism of our personal memory alone (if at all). We move or act in various already as coherent understood situations which engender us to "see" or recognize its different aspects. We can't produce the world from our inner memory. — waarala

Without recognition there would be no continuity of experience. Without memory there could be no recognition. The condition known as "anterograde amnesia" attests to this.So memory is necessary, if not sufficient it seems; which leaves me wondering what are the other factors you have in mind. The world itself, with its similarities and differences?

An interesting quote from Wittgenstein; not quite sure what the implications there are. — Janus

Quite a few but this thread is not the place to get into it, but has to do with thinking and seeing and saying.