t is all of what we might say, and yet none of these: certainly logic is not about nothing, nor is affectivity; but concepts like these that quantify and divide experience, because they are categories, do not represent the original uncategorized primordial whole. — Astrophel
The question then is, what does affectivity "say" in the setting of being restored to its place? — Astrophel
I am taking the notion of intellectual intuition to task. Intellectualism gives undo privilege to cognition, and the term cognition, like all terms, is an artificial structure imposed on the world to talk about it, manage it, have discourse on it, and so on. — Astrophel
But the original whole out of which this categorical thinking issues remains what it is. It is all of what we might say, and yet none of these: certainly logic is not about nothing, nor is affectivity; but concepts like these that quantify and divide experience, because they are categories, do not represent the original uncategorized primordial whole.
The idea here is to put at bay the knowledge claims that spontaneously spring into play when we experience the world. Such a suspension delivers the world from the imposition of abstraction that the primacy of the intellect has brought to philosophy. And affectivity is no longer pushed into irrelevance.
The question then is, what does affectivity "say" in the setting of being restored to its place? — Astrophel
The question then is, what does affectivity "say" in the setting of being restored to its place?
— Astrophel
Affectivity alone does not say anything, it is just feeling — Janus
Sounds to me like a revelation is what you are looking for, but why think there is any relationship between intuitions and revelation? — wonderer1
I am saying quite the opposite: there is an ontology that stands behind, with, and in, all knowledge claims, rendering them epistemically non arbitrary. This is the point. — Astrophel
… analysis places the intuition apart from the understanding, the former being affective, the latter cognitive, and the understanding is distinctively cognitive. Non propositional knowledge is not recognized. — Astrophel
One is simply directed to purify one's gaze, deliver observation from the presumptive thinking that generally steps in and makes claims and argues…. — Astrophel
But I argue that even though we face the world in a determinate historical way (educated and enculturated), the event of acknowledging something retains its original status as an intuition. — Astrophel
They say that once an intuition is observed it is already embedded in context, and the "purity" (or innocence) of the observation is entirely undone. — Astrophel
It is called 'I am' in the context of language; it is complex in that when you look for the 'I am" you find a multiplicity, not a singularity. One finds thinking, feeling and the rest; but a single "I" does not show up. — Astrophel
On the other hand affect without thought is not without significance, but is of no discursive significance. — Janus
Embodied theorists reverse the traditional scheme of prioritization of thought over feelings, by making affective inputs the condition of possibility of relevance and meaning in thought. It is through the feeling body that things show up as salient; an alteration in how the body feels is at the same time a shift in how the world appears and in how one relates to it. — Joshs
Sounds to me like a revelation is what you are looking for, but why think there is any relationship between intuitions and revelation? — wonderer1
If you can elaborate this a little more I would like to hear it. Note: plain language would help if possible. — I like sushi
Agreed, in principle. What does any of that have to do with existential absolutes or foundational existences? I mean, you brought them up….I guess….in an attempt to lay the groundwork for something apparently about the world, but from what you’ve called our contemplative midst. I can’t seem to find a connection you’ve made between them, as yet anyway. — Mww
To purify one’s gaze makes none but metaphorical sense, but nevertheless observation is already delivered…..separated…..from presumptive thinking, which you’ve already granted, insofar as affective intuition is placed apart from cognitive understanding. — Mww
Again, agreed in principle, overlooking the repetitive semantic disassociation (we in general face the world, but each subject alone, retains some original status). Still, no exposition of a relation between an existential absolutes and foundational intuitions. And yet the problem seems to be the loss of foundational intuitions and the subsequent recovery of them, or at least their status as such. But how can that be the case, in a systemic whole? Can’t lose a part then get it back and still have the system maintain itself. — Mww
I’m guessing that because intuitions are representations of observations, the rationale is that the innocence of being observed is lost to manifestation as phenomenon. While that does no harm, it also has no benefit. Seems like naught but a minor rendition of “non-overlapping magisteria”, in that observation is this, intuition is that and while one necessarily presupposes the other, neither is contained in the other. In other words, intuitions are never that which is observed, which in turn leaves observation to be just what it is, no part of it in the least undone. — Mww
I think you’re trying to elaborate on the distinction between private philosophy (thought) and public philosophizing (thought-in-the-world), re:
It is called 'I am' in the context of language; it is complex in that when you look for the 'I am" you find a multiplicity, not a singularity. One finds thinking, feeling and the rest; but a single "I" does not show up.
— Astrophel
So it was called “I am” in the context of “I think”, as it should be. I am that which thinks, is a singularity. Even though “I” never shows up in thought, it is nonetheless the case that all thought is the manifestation of a singular thinker, for which “I” is merely the representation. All of THAT, in the context of language. — Mww
One has to ask what a foundational existence could even mean — Astrophel
And also keeping in mind that a word like 'absolute' has already corrupted the inquiry. — Astrophel
”I am" is not a singularity. there are no such things in language. — Astrophel
to engage a singularity is impossible. — Astrophel
If by discourse you mean language, isnt verbal discourse merely a formalized product of a more fundamental discursive process of inter-affection? And is there ever affect without thought? What is thinking if not construing on the basis of similarities and differences, and what is construing if not a way of being affected by events? Isnt the distinction between thought and feeling arbitrary and unjustified? When dispositions to act and acts themselves, being and becoming, feeling and intention, state and function, body and mind are treated as separately inhering states, then their relations are rendered secondary and arbitrary, requiring extrinsic causations to piece them together. — Joshs
It is a revelation about what one intuits when intuition discovers the world that has been pushed out of sight by language and culture. — Astrophel
I asked, because you brought them up. I’m guessing you know what a can of worms they are, which makes me wonder….why bring them up, then do nothing with them. — Mww
I agree with this, but this revelation is commonplace; it is with us every instant of everyday experience, in that which exceeds our discursive understandings of what is happening. We just have to learn to notice... — Janus
I do find it a little puzzling that comments I made were in no way suggestive of "a mutually profitable dialectic." — Astrophel
There is more to this, but I wonder if a mutually profitable dialectic has been encouraged thus far. — Astrophel
Principled thinking is not called into question. It is rerouted to self examination that asks what does "principled" even mean? It is desire, mood, yearning, "toward"; just as reason moves forward toward consummation, it moves forward toward affective consummation, and this is the aesthetic apprehension of metaphysics — Astrophel
The hard part of seeing this is assigning truth value to affectivity. — Astrophel
Truth isn't, nor has it ever been, just a propositional affair (see Rorty, and, I guess, most analytic philosophers). To see a truth IS an aesthetic experience. — Astrophel
Aren’t the affective and reason joined precisely where affective purpose, relevance and desire meet rational validation, recognition and intelligibility? This is the basis of enactivist models of sense-making, wherein the anticipatory goal-directed pragmatic functioning of an organism defines its rationality on the basis of consistency of events with its aims and desires. Reason as relevance. — Joshs
There is more to this, but I wonder if a mutually profitable dialectic has been encouraged thus far. — Astrophel
philosophy conceived as "feast of thought" (….) and while it certainly is this, it begs the question, what is thought? — Astrophel
but thought is never simply thought; it is inherently aesthetic (see Dewey on this — Astrophel
Truth isn't, nor has it ever been, just a propositional affair — Astrophel
Following Peirce, I would argue any notion of truth is semiotic. And science now tells us that humans engage in semiosis at four levels of encoding or sign relations.
We engage with the world via genes, neurons, words and numbers. Or more broadly, we are neurobiological creatures first, but have become also sociocultural creatures as well.
And so I say you are confusing the levels at which we “exist in the flow of nature”. Neurobiology sets us up as affective selves. We respond to the world as we find it in “emotional” ways. We read our surroundings in ways that deal with our basic survival. Our responses are the physiological states and behavioural habits appropriate to that level of world modelling.
Then philosophy comes in at a very different level. It is based on the abstracted notion of universalised reason and the specific of measurement. It is based on the third person absolute detachment that we imagine as the God’s eye objective point of view that it dialectically opposed to our embodied, affective, subjective, first person point of view. — apokrisis
So in reality, as living breathing human beings also carving out space in social communities, we of course feel as well as reason. We see as well as measure. It can seem impossible to split off the neurobiological aspects of our semiotic organisation from our socialcultural ones. — apokrisis
Yet the sensible definition of philosophy is just that. It is the attempt to reach the limit of detachment from the point of view of a creature rooted in embodied subjectivity.
Reasoning still depends on affect as we well know. It feels quite different to be certain vs uncertain. We get a feeling when something clicks and seems right - the aha! response — apokrisis
But in the interests of fostering philosophical detachment, that is why we have come to lean on the pragmatism of the scientific method. We take claims of feeling convinced out of the equation as much as possible. We invent statistical methods to quantify our proper position on spectrums of certainty-uncertainty. — apokrisis
We aim to feel no more strongly about some conviction than that of the response of the click of pattern recognition. We have been presented with some complicated puzzle. There is then some satisfaction in making the last piece fit to complete the whole picture.
So sure, truth isn’t just propositional. AP types got that wrong. Truth comes in its grades of semiosis. The body has to react in ways that are “affective” to be effective in its world.
But then truth as a game being played at the highest level of detached abstraction is understood as “other” to this embodied affectiveness. It is Peirce’s community of reason that aims for objectivity via the cycle of abduction, deduction and inductive confirmation. Make a guess at a general causal relation, deduce the particular logical consequences of that being true, then test to see how those expectations turn out in terms of numbers on dials.
Flickers on needles rather than flickers of the heart are the currency of rational inquiry. — apokrisis
We can assign, in the sense of feel, "truth value" in the affective. It has the sense of actuality, of truth in the sense of alethia or revealing (or "unconcealing"). The act-ual is revealed by acting, by affecting.
But this notion of truth is quite different than the idea of propositional truth, which applies only to statements or assertions. — Janus
It is on account of this "revealing" of actuality which is everyday experience (when we notice it) that we can say that everyday experience is (or can be) a revelation. But this has nothing to do with discursive knowledge or explanation, because as soon as the attempt is made to describe this experience in our necessarily dualistic language the original non-duality of the actual is more or less obscured. I say "more or less" because I think the sense of non-duality, of the numinous, although not capable of description, can be evoked by metaphor, by poetic language (and of course by the other arts). — Janus
If you think you know then you don't know! :smile:I think I know what it is to know — Astrophel
Indeed it's not thinking that creates knowledge, but not because the reason you give but because thinking and knowledge do not match, as I showed above.it's not the cogito that grounds knowing because the "I" that thinks remains at a distance from that which is thought. — Astrophel
I agree with the first. I disagree with the second. "Epistemic" means of or relating to knowledge or the conditions for acquiring it. And, as I shown, thinking and knowledge are incompatible concepts."I am" is an ontological claim; "I think" is epistemic. — Astrophel
I agree. I have mentioned in here and elsewhere that thinking is not prove that one exists. But I have also thought that maybe by "thinking" Descartes meant "being aware". In which case, he was right.What Descartes didn't see was that the "Deus deceptor" could indeed still be constructing an illusion — Astrophel
This is a good point you have brought up. It reminds me of what imagination and intuition meant to Einstein in relation to knowledge:underlying our knowledge of the world, there is a foundation of intuition — Astrophel
What if it could be said what thought is by what it does? If only this can be done by thinking, then the doing of this is thinking. If I think of, or cognize, a dog as fur, teeth, a tail, a nose, in a certain arrangement, and if fur, teeth, tails and noses represent conceptions I’ve thought, than I should be authorized to say….thought is cognition by means of synthesis of conceptions to each other. And its negation works just as well, insofar as if I cannot connect a set of conceptions to each other, then I have no authority to say I’ve thought anything at all. — Mww
If you think you know then you don't know! :smile:
Knowing means understanding clearly and with certainty.
Thinking --in this context and case-- means considering something possible.
These two do not match. — Alkis Piskas
Indeed it's not thinking that creates knowledge, but not because the reason you give but because thinking and knowledge do not match, as I showed above.
That "the 'I' that thinks remains at a distance from that which is thought" doesn't mean much. You can equally say that I am at a distance from my memories, my emotions, everything created by my mind, consciously or unconsciously, intentionally or unintentionally. Yet, I am connected to them unbreakably. In fact, the thinker is the thought. — Alkis Piskas
I agree with the first. I disagree with the second. "Epistemic" means of or relating to knowledge or the conditions for acquiring it. And, as I shown, thinking and knowledge are incompatible concepts. — Alkis Piskas
I agree. I have mentioned in here and elsewhere that thinking is not prove that one exists. But I have also thought that maybe by "thinking" Descartes meant "being aware". In which case, he was right.
See, at that time the terms and concepts of "consciousness" and "awareness" were not developed yet. — Alkis Piskas
This is a good point you have brought up. It reminds me of what imagination and intuition meant to Einstein in relation to knowledge:
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.”
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“I believe in intuition and inspiration. At times I feel certain I am right while not knowing the reason.” — Alkis Piskas
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