A question that might be asked is whether this is true by definition --- whether we tend to understand 'Being' [the truly real ] precisely in terms of constant presence. If so, is this a bias ?
I'm of course not the first person to speculate in this way. I bring up a famous issue. Much of radicality of Being and Time is perhaps in its claim or suggestion (according to some) that being is time — plaque flag
“…the answer Aristotle gave to the question of the
essential nature of time still governs Nietzsche's idea of
time. What is the situation in regard to time? In being,
present in time at the given moment is only that narrow
ridge of the momentary fugitive "now," rising out of the
"not yet now'' and falling away into the "no longer now”
Nietzsche conceives time metaphysically as a succession of punctual‘nows’.
“This passing away is conceived more precisely as the successive flowing away of the "now" out of the "not yet now" into the "no longer now."… Time persists, consists in passing. It is, in that it constantly is not. This is the representational idea of time that characterizes the concept of time' which is standard throughout the metaphysics of the West…. in all metaphysics from the beginning of Western thought, Being means being present, Being, if it is to be thought in the highest instance, must be thought as pure presence, that is, as the presence that persists, the abiding present, the steadily standing "now.
To modern metaphysics, the Being of beings appears as will.” In Nietzsche’s will to power, will is that which is present to itself as what is.
“Among the long established predicates of primal being are"eternity and independence of time. Eternal will
does not mean only a will that lasts eternally: it says that will is primal being only when it is eternal as will….The primal being of beings is the will, as the eternally recurrent willing of the eternal recurrence of the same. The eternal recurrence of the same is the supreme triumph of the metaphysics of the will that eternally wills its own willing.
What is in time is what recurs in the eternal return. Only because Nietzsche thinks of time in terms of the traditional metaphysical notion of ‘in-timeless’, the sequence of present nows, can he posit the eternal return as the endless presence (Being) of the willing of itself.
…will is primal being only when it is eternal as will. And it is that when, as will, it eternally wills the eternity
of willing. The will that is eternal in this sense no longer follows and depends on the temporal in what it wills,
or in its willing. It is independent of time. And so it can no longer be affronted by time.
The will is delivered from revulsion when it wills the constant recurrence of the same. Then the will
wills the eternity of what is willed. The will wills its own eternity. Will is primal being. The highest product of primal being is eternity. The primal being of beings is the will, as the eternally recurrent willing of the eternal recurrence of the same. The eternal recurrence of the same is the supreme triumph of the metaphysics of the will that eternally wills its own willing.
The eternal recurrence of the same is the supreme triumph of the metaphysics of the will that eternally wills its own willing.
I think the most charitable way to read it is as gazing on The Unchanging with adoration. Or feeling oneself in a sort of divine stasis, having temporarily become The Illuminated One — plaque flag
Non-judgemental , non-intending bare awareness of being is connected with the feeling of unconditional, intrinsic, spontaneous compassion and benevolence, peace and fundamental warmth toward the phenomenal world, concern for the welfare of others beyond mere naive compassion, joy and of the mind, etc, and this is a kind of auto-affection or self-luminosity. — Joshs
That sounds right. I like Rahula's What The Buddha Taught, and I imagine the state you describe as the goal. This is a kind of auto-affection or self-luminosity. Feuerbach also, in his own words, sees and says this. — plaque flag
I don't go out of my way to meditate, but I can report of my happy and at-ease states, which are fortunately pretty regular, that there's a leaping from stone to stone. So it's maybe that lack of stickiness or viscosity that matters. Or what a beatnik would call a hang-up. Again I roll in Hobbes.But this thinking all rests on the supposition of a purely ‘neutral’ attention that can be separated off from any intentional objects being attended to. But there is no such thing as neutral attention. To attend to something is already to intend it, to desire, to will. Attending is a biasing. — Joshs
it is at every moment relating to a new object (its own changing sense of non-objectifying awareness of the arising and passing away of temporary forms), and being affected, disturbed, by it. Disturbance, desire and dislocating becoming is prior to, that is, implicit but not noticed in ‘neutral' compassionate awareness. — Joshs
Not to be difficult, but claiming that all metaphysical questions are undecidable seems to decide an important metaphysical question. — plaque flag
A question that might be asked is whether this is true by definition --- whether we tend to understand 'Being' [the truly real ] precisely in terms of constant presence. If so, is this a bias ? — plaque flag
Much of the radicality of Being and Time is perhaps in its claim or suggestion (according to some) that being is time. This is maybe like Heraclitus making the Flux itself most real.
My own view is that discursive philosophers really can't help looking for atemporal structure.
Wittgenstein tried to express the logical form of [the conceptual aspect of] the world....
I’m aware that the classical understanding of the ultimately real is the eternally unchanging. My argument is that the idea of seeing beyond time to some sort of awareness or reality is incoherent. To be aware is to change. Pure anything , including pure timelessness, is not Being but the definition of death itself. — Joshs
Heraclitus points out that in the world of time there is constant change but does not suggest this is the fundamental nature of reality. Heraclitus and Parmenides are easy to reconcile. . — FrancisRay
It is simply a fact. All selective conclusions about the world as a whole are undecidable. This is demonstrable and old news. Figuring out what it implies for the world is the entire secret of metaphysics. — FrancisRay
Not disagreeing, but Why ? Note that 'fundamental' is a metaphor that gestures to the ground, the soil, that upon which everything stands, typically unmoving, which is how we experience the earth beneath us, tho we know it hurtles through space.A fundamental theory must reduce space-time, motion and change. — FrancisRay
I feel the phrase 'atemporal structure is an oxymoron. How can one have a structure without time? — FrancisRay
Not trying to be difficult, but the expectation in a context like ours is that one justify grand claims of that nature. I readily grant that adopting the role of the critical-discursive philosopher in the first place is optional. Most of us here live in free societies where the problem is people being too bored with spiritual babble of strangers to be offended by anything more than the buttonholing itself, with the incommodious proselytizing form rather than the content. Too many fathers, not enough sons, that sort of thing. — plaque flag
Not disagreeing, but Why ? — plaque flag
I'm not the one who denies time. Indeed, I'm insisted that being is time in some sense. I write of 'interpenetrating worldstreamings.' In this context, structure is something constant in the flux. For instance, physicists once talked of the conservation of energy. Or there's the tripartite 'care structure' of the stretch moment mentioned above, inspired by Husserl and Heidegger. So one can, in my view, have nothing at all without time. — plaque flag
I don't nee to work hard to justify what I said. I was agreeing with just about every philosopher who ever lived. It is simply a fact that metaphysical questions are undecidable. This is the reason such questions are called antinomies. There's nothing mysterious about it and it's common knowledge. . . . — FrancisRay
This is not a philosophical way of doing business. I think for now we should take a break in the conversation. But no hard feelings. I just think it'll be counterproductive to proceed, given our apparently very different conceptions of what kind of conversation this forum is for. — plaque flag
In being,
present in time at the given moment is only that narrow
ridge of the momentary fugitive "now," rising out of the
"not yet now'' and falling away into the "no longer now”
Not to be difficult, but claiming that all metaphysical questions are undecidable seems to decide an important metaphysical question. — plaque flag
I don't see it as a metaphysical question, but a phenomenological one. It is a phenomenological fact that metaphysical questions are undecidable. The alternative would be to collapse metaphysics into phenomenology; in some respects, both Kant and Heidegger do this, but then metaphysics is no longer metaphysics, as traditionally conceived, and we have lost a valid distinction between avenues of investigation. — Janus
My own phenomenology-inspired view rejects the idea that reality is hidden somehow 'outside' of a so-called subjectivity that is thought of as 'inside.' — plaque flag
Exactly! And no-thing is precisely what we need as the ultimate for a systematic fundamental theory. Again, Kant proves this. At any rate, mysticism will make no sense to anyone who reifies time or space. — FrancisRay
In the same vein, Meister Eckhart dismisses space-time phenomena as 'literally nothing'. — FrancisRay
"Monks, the All is aflame. What All is aflame? The eye is aflame. Forms are aflame. Consciousness at the eye is aflame. Contact at the eye is aflame. And whatever there is that arises in dependence on contact at the eye — experienced as pleasure, pain or neither-pleasure-nor-pain — that too is aflame. Aflame with what? Aflame with the fire of passion, the fire of aversion, the fire of delusion. Aflame, I tell you, with birth, aging & death, with sorrows, lamentations, pains, distresses, & despairs.
...
"The intellect is aflame. Ideas are aflame. Consciousness at the intellect is aflame. Contact at the intellect is aflame. And whatever there is that arises in dependence on contact at the intellect — experienced as pleasure, pain or neither-pleasure-nor-pain — that too is aflame. Aflame with what? Aflame with the fire of passion, the fire of aversion, the fire of delusion. Aflame, I say, with birth, aging & death, with sorrows, lamentations, pains, distresses, & despairs.
"Seeing thus, the well-instructed disciple of the noble ones grows disenchanted with the eye, disenchanted with forms, disenchanted with consciousness at the eye, disenchanted with contact at the eye. And whatever there is that arises in dependence on contact at the eye, experienced as pleasure, pain or neither-pleasure-nor-pain: With that, too, he grows disenchanted.
...
"He grows disenchanted with the intellect, disenchanted with ideas, disenchanted with consciousness at the intellect, disenchanted with contact at the intellect. And whatever there is that arises in dependence on contact at the intellect, experienced as pleasure, pain or neither-pleasure-nor-pain: He grows disenchanted with that too. Disenchanted, he becomes dispassionate. Through dispassion, he is fully released. With full release, there is the knowledge, 'Fully released.' He discerns that 'Birth is ended, the holy life fulfilled, the task done. There is nothing further for this world.'"
It may perhaps be said, that the preceding theory gives, indeed, some account of the idea of Permanent Existence which forms part of our conception of matter, but gives no explanation of our believing these permanent objects to be external, or out of ourselves. I apprehend, on the contrary, that the very idea of anything out of ourselves is derived solely from the knowledge experience gives us of the Permanent Possibilities. Our sensations we carry with us wherever we go, and they never exist where we are not; but when we change our place we do not carry away with us the Permanent Possibilities of Sensation: they remain until we return, or arise and cease under conditions with which our presence has in general nothing to do. And more than all—they are, and will be after we have ceased to feel, Permanent Possibilities of sensation to other beings than ourselves. Thus our actual sensations and the permanent possibilities of sensation, stand out in obtrusive contrast to one another: and when the idea of Cause has been acquired, and extended by generalization from the parts of our experience to its aggregate whole, nothing can be more natural than that the Permanent Possibilities should be classed by us as existences generically distinct from our sensations, but of which our sensations are the effect.
*
The same theory which accounts for our ascribing to an aggregate of possibilities of sensation, a permanent existence which our sensations themselves do not possess, and consequently a greater reality than belongs to our sensations, also explains our attributing greater objectivity to the Primary Qualities of bodies than to the Secondary. For the sensations which correspond to what are called the Primary Qualities (as soon at least as we come to apprehend them by two senses, the eye as well as the touch) are always present when any part of the group is so. But colours, tastes, smells, and the like, being, in comparison, fugacious, are not, in the same degree, conceived as being always there, even when nobody is present to perceive them. The sensations answering to the Secondary Qualities are only occasional, those to the Primary, constant. The Secondary, moreover, vary with different persons, and with the temporary sensibility of our organs; the Primary, when perceived at all, are, as far as we know, the same to all persons and at all times.
...
We have no conception of Mind itself, as distinguished from its conscious manifestations. We neither know nor can imagine it, except as represented by the succession of manifold feelings which metaphysicians call by the name of States or Modifications of Mind. It is nevertheless true that our notion of Mind, as well as of Matter, is the notion of a permanent something, contrasted with the perpetual flux of the sensations and other feelings or mental states which we refer to it; a something which we figure as remaining the same, while the particular feelings through which it reveals its existence, change. This attribute of Permanence, supposing that there were nothing else to be considered, would admit of the same explanation when predicated of Mind, as of Matter. The belief I entertain that my mind exists when it is not feeling, nor thinking, nor conscious of its own existence, resolves itself into the belief of a Permanent Possibility of these states. If I think of myself as in dreamless sleep, or in the sleep of death, and believe that I, or in other words my mind, is or will be existing through these states, though not in conscious feeling, the most scrupulous examination of my belief will not detect in it any fact actually believed, except that my capability of feeling is not, in that interval, permanently destroyed, and is suspended only because it does not meet with the combination of conditions which would call it into action: the moment it did meet with that combination it would revive, and remains, therefore, a Permanent Possibility.
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