One of my concerns about hidden-in-principle stuff in the self is that it leads us back into dualism. — plaque flag
The intellect is to be abandoned. Ideas are to be abandoned. Consciousness at the intellect is to be abandoned. Contact at the intellect is to be abandoned. 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 to be abandoned. — Pahanaya Sutta, SN 35.24
Then Ven. Maha Kotthita went to Ven. Sariputta and, on arrival, exchanged courteous greetings with him. After an exchange of friendly greetings & courtesies, he sat to one side. As he was sitting there, he said to Ven. Sariputta, "With the remainderless stopping & fading of the six contact-media [vision, hearing, smell, taste, touch, & intellection] is it the case that there is anything else?"
[Sariputta:] "Don't say that, my friend."
[Maha Kotthita:] "With the remainderless stopping & fading of the six contact-media, is it the case that there is not anything else?"
[Sariputta:] "Don't say that, my friend."
….
[Sariputta:] "The statement, 'With the remainderless stopping & fading of the six contact-media [vision, hearing, smell, taste, touch, & intellection] is it the case that there is anything else?' objectifies non-objectification.The statement, '... is it the case that there is not anything else ... is it the case that there both is & is not anything else ... is it the case that there neither is nor is not anything else?' objectifies non-objectification. However far the six contact-media go, that is how far objectification goes. However far objectification goes, that is how far the six contact media go. With the remainderless fading & stopping of the six contact-media, there comes to be the stopping, the allaying of objectification. — Kotthita Sutta, AN 4.174
:up:As Thanissaro Bikkhu (translator) notes in his commentary, ‘the root of the classifications and perceptions of objectification is the thought, "I am the thinker." This thought forms the motivation for the questions that Ven. Maha Kotthita is presenting here.’ The very action of thinking ‘creates the thinker’, rather than vice versa. — Wayfarer
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/johann-fichte/#Foun“the I posits itself”; more specifically, “the I posits itself as an I.” Since this activity of “self-positing” is taken to be the fundamental feature of I-hood in general, the first principle asserts that “the I posits itself as self-positing.”
The principle in question simply states that the essence of I-hood lies in the assertion of ones own self-identity, i.e., that consciousness presupposes self-consciousness (the Kantian “I think,” which must, at least in principle, be able to accompany all our representations). Such immediate self-identify, however, cannot be understood as a psychological “fact,” no matter how privileged, nor as an “action” or “accident” of some previously existing substance or being. To be sure, it is an “action” of the I, but one that is identical with the very existence of the same. In Fichte’s technical terminology, the original unity of self-consciousness is to be understood as both an action and as the product of the same: as a Tathandlung or “fact/act,” a unity that is presupposed by and contained within every fact and every act of empirical consciousness, though it never appears as such therein.
...
A fundamental corollary of Fichte’s understanding of I-hood (Ichheit) as a kind of fact/act is his denial that the I is originally any sort of “thing” or “substance.” Instead, the I is simply what it posits itself to be, and thus its “being” is, so to speak, a consequence of its self-positing, or rather, is co-terminus with the same.
Then Ven. Maha Kotthita went to Ven. Sariputta and, on arrival, exchanged courteous greetings with him. After an exchange of friendly greetings & courtesies, he sat to one side. As he was sitting there, he said to Ven. Sariputta, "With the remainderless stopping & fading of the six contact-media [vision, hearing, smell, taste, touch, & intellection] is it the case that there is anything else?" — Kotthita Sutta, AN 4.174
As long as you include Kant in your criticism, I hear you. — plaque flag
I might argue that point. Ya know….we cannot think a thing then think we have thought otherwise, but we can think a thing and talk about it as if we thought of it otherwise. You cannot fake your thoughts but you can fake your language regarding your thoughts. — Mww
Yes! :100:I interpret Kant's idea of in-itself as signifying that we know only what appears to us, which is not to say we know nothing of consciousness-independent real things, but that the reality of those things is not exhausted by how they appear to us and other cognitive beings. — Janus
But doing such just maintains the status quo. If one puts oneself into another's shoes, one can always understand them, always perceive them as reasonable. How does that solve anything?How does phenomenology explain the existence of disagreement between people? And how does it propose that disagreement be resolved?
— baker
Husserl puts the emphasis on empathetically understanding the other from within their one perspective.
/.../ — Joshs
Who is "us"? Mankind as a whole, any particular person, or a particular person (but not some other person)?So, I interpret Kant's idea of in-itself as signifying that we know only what appears to us, which is not to say we know nothing of consciousness-independent real things, but that the reality of those things is not exhausted by how they appear to us and other cognitive beings. — Janus
I think there is a big reason why someone saysI think many of these disagreements come down to preferred ways of talking, and underlying the apparent differences produced by different locutions there may be more agreement than there often appears to be. It is remarkable how important these metaphysical speculations seem to be to folk.
Who is "us"? Mankind as a whole, any particular person, or a particular person (but not some other person)? — baker
To wit: I once said to someone that Henry James' "Portrait of a Lady" was one of my favorite books. He replied, "You're wrong, because this is actually a very boring book."
From this, it's clear he took for granted that there is an objective reality, that a book has a particular immanent value, and that he knows "how things really are" while I don't. Other conversations with him supported this.
The differences in locutions are not superficial. — baker
Which is impossible when one of the participants is a moderator, putting his moderator foot down.What matters (to me at least) is open discussion and cogent arguments, though, and points of agreement with historic philosophers (authorities) are worthless without cogent arguments presented in our own words and accompanied by a willingness to hear them critiqued and being prepared to sustain engagement as long as is required to either arrive at agreement or agreement to disagree. — Janus
https://www.wittgensteinproject.org/w/index.php?title=Blue_BookThe idea is that the same object may be before his eyes and mine, but that I can't stick my head into his (or my mind into his, which comes to the same) so that the real and immediate object of his vision becomes the real and immediate object of my vision, too. By “I don't know what he sees” we really mean “I don't know what he looks at”, where “what he looks at” is hidden and he can't show it to me; it is before his mind's eye. Therefore, in order to get rid of this puzzle, examine the grammatical difference between the statements “I don't know what he sees” and “I don't know what he looks at”, as they are actually used in our language.
Sometimes the most satisfying expression of our solipsism seems to be this: “When anything is seen (really seen), it is always I who see it”.
What should strike us about this expression is the phrase “always I”. Always who? – For, queer enough, I don't mean: “always L.W.”
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What tempted me to say “it is always I who see when anything is seen”, I could also have yielded to by saying: “when ever anything is seen, it is this which is seen”, accompanying the word “this” by a gesture embracing my visual field (but not meaning by “this” the particular objects which I happen to see at the moment). One might say, “I am pointing at the visual field as such, not at anything in it”. And this only serves to bring out the senselessness of the former expression.
Let us then discard the “always” in our expression. Then I can still express my solipsism by saying, “Only what I see (or: see now) is really seen”. And here I am tempted to say: “Although by the word “I” I don't mean L.W., it will do if the others understand “I” to mean L.W. if just now I am in fact L.W.”. I could also express my claim by saying: “I am the vessel of life”; but mark, it is essential that everyone to whom I say this should be unable to understand me. It is essential that the other should not be able to understand “what I really mean”, though in practice he might do what I wish by conceding to me an exceptional position in his notation. But I wish it to be logically impossible that he should understand me, that is to say, it should be meaningless, |(Ts-309,109) not false, to say that he understands me. Thus my expression is one of the many which is used on various occasions by philosophers and supposed to convey something to the person who says it, though essentially incapable of conveying anything to anyone else. — The Blue Book
https://archive.org/stream/notebooks191419100witt/notebooks191419100witt_djvu.txtWhat has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world!
I want to report how I found the world.
What others in the world have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience of the world.
I have to judge the world, to measure things.
— The Notebooks
Close enough. When I see “way of thinking”, I interpret “way” as “method”. — Mww
The other thought that occurred to me was that not all ways of thinking are methodical. — Janus
Hume dissolved the self. Mach and Heidegger do so in their own ways. I hope it's not too eurocentric to hope for some kind of universal human insight here, which is a product of a universal-enough human logic. — plaque flag
Some of my best work related thinking has ocurred when I'm not thinking about the topic, and possibly even while I was sleeping. — wonderer1
Influenced by the Zen experience of Enlightenment (“satori”), the Japanese philosopher Kitarō Nishida writes in his classic work An Inquiry into the Good: “Over time I came to realize that it is not that experience exists because there is an individual, but that an individual exists because there is experience. I thus arrived at the idea that experience is more fundamental than individual differences, and in this way I was able to avoid solipsism… The individual’s experience is simply a small, distinctive sphere of limited experience within true experience. (Nishida, Kitarō (1990 [1922]), An Inquiry into the Good.)
With his statement that the Zen experience of Enlightenment enabled him to “avoid solipsism”, Nisihida indicates the insight that consciousness is not ‘locked up’ inside the individual’s head or brain: “it is not that consciousness is within the body, but that the body is within consciousness”. (Idem: 43.) If consciousness resided in the brain, it would indeed be cut off from the world outside one’s skull, which would invite the solipsistic conclusion that all I can know is the phenomenal world appearing in my subjective consciousness, but not the real, objective world outside of it. The Zen realization that consciousness is radically different, that it is rather the non-dual openness in which both individual and world appear, thus takes away the threat of solipsism. Nishida, of course, does not deny that brain activity is closely connected to individual mind activity, but for him this only means that one group of phenomena appearing in consciousness (mental processes) correlates with another such group (neural processes): “To say that phenomena of consciousness accompany stimulation to nerve centers means that one sort of phenomena of consciousness necessarily occurs together with another.” (Ibidem.) This already gives a glimpse of how Western Idealism can benefit from Eastern spirituality.
The question of solipsism has come up several times in this thread. ‘If “the world” is experience alone, then how is solipsism avoided?’ — Wayfarer
The key representatives of objective idealism I can think of are Hegel and Plato. — Count Timothy von Icarus
It just exactly the world's being. — plaque flag
:up:The Zen realization that consciousness is radically different, that it is rather the non-dual openness in which both individual and world appear,
Why ‘the world’s’ being? Could you elaborate on that? — Wayfarer
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