I am certainly not arguing it is impossible to communicate them but it is difficult. The examples I have given is a sighted person who doesn't dream in images like me and My mother who hasn't had a headache. They can use the words "dream" and "headache" without referring to the same thing. — Andrew4Handel

Here you say it’s difficult to communicate one’s experience, but as support for this you give the fact that your mother can talk about experiences she hasn’t had. I would think this shows rather that the barriers to communication in these cases are not too high at all.

I haven’t read Heidegger. There was a time when I was very attracted to his early thought and I’d planned to read it, but lately I’ve been swayed by Adorno’s rather scornful criticism. But I see what you mean with respect to the observer. However, I think that aspect of Heidegger is shared among a few other twentieth century thinkers.

And who are these people just sitting around observing all the time? Why are they the paradigmatic subjects when others are busy doing stuff?

You say “only within which [a point of view] any statement about what is real or what exists is meaningful”, and I can equally say that only within a community of speakers is any such statement meaningful, and further, only within such a community does your observer even exist. — Jamal

Incidentally, epistemology steps in here to say it’s only from a in my single point of view that I can find any secure knowledge, the “community of speakers” being relatively uncertain. But that’s just the Cartesian mistake, based on a presumed gulf between inner and outer and the choice to begin with the former.

Actually that’s a lie, I’ve read his Philosophy of History.

The “universal form of subjectivity” is Kantian.

That's more or less straightforward Hegelianism, isn't it? — Wayfarer

Not that I know of. I haven’t read Hegel. How so?

You mean, the reality that exists in the absence of any observers, right? — Wayfarer

I mean the reality that the observers are part of and that is bigger than them.

What the observer brings to experience is a perspective, a point of view, only within which any statement about what is real or what exists is meaningful. Realism forgets the subject and seeks only explanations and fundamental causes which are inherent in the objective domain. But that is impossible, as the very source of that order is the mind of the observer (that's more or less straight out of Schopenhauer). — Wayfarer

And like all idealism his philosophy is saturated with what he is trying to ground through subjectivity: the objective world, language, and society. When philosophers talk about the “I”, they presuppose the “we”, because they do not mean a single empirical subject but the universal form of subjectivity, an idea that assumes its instantiation in a plurality of individuals, i.e., society. When you say “the observer”, who are you talking about? I think you’re talking not only about yourself but about lots of other actual people. Or rather, you secretly or unknowingly abstract away from lots of other actual subjects to the pure form of subjectivity.

That is to say, idealism is parasitic on the real. Both idealists and realists begin with the objective world, that which is not encompassed by the mind, but idealists don’t realize it.

You say “only within which [a point of view] any statement about what is real or what exists is meaningful”, and I can equally say that only within a community of speakers is any such statement meaningful, and further, only within such a community does your observer even exist.

In the second half of the course, starting around lecture 10, he begins to build an elaborate argument, based on the CPR, against all idealism and all philosophy that seeks a ground of being or knowledge, and for dialectics. It’s rich stuff, though unexpected for an introductory course. It turns out he was doing immanent critique all along.

I’m currently at lecture 15 and eager to see where he goes next. I would honestly be pissed off if someone spoiled the ending for me.

Take your time. If it doesn’t appear for another five years, I can live with that. We’re all just excited about it.

If I read any SF in the near future it’ll be Ubik again so I can say something interesting in your possibly forthcoming discussion.

And a big nose. A nose than which none greater can be conceived.

very bizarre and rather hard to follow — Noble Dust

Perfect!

I hadn’t even heard of that one.

If two people have headaches there is no way of comparing whether both of them are having the same type of pain. — Andrew4Handel

Does this mean we are closed off from others in some kind of profound way? — Andrew4Handel

I think of my subjectivity as my point of view. My point of view is my own--only I can stand right here, right now--and expecting someone else to share it is to expect them to be me, and that doesn't make sense. It's too much to ask. Does this count as being closed off? Maybe it would if we didn't have language to communicate what we perceive and feel (having lived in countries where I don't know the language well, I know the feeling of isolation and powerlessness)--but then if we didn't have language we wouldn't be the kind of creatures who worried about being closed off. Maybe it follows that the conditions that lead us to think we are closed off--a rich inner life that owes its existence to the essentially social fact of language--are precisely those that allow us not to be.

Though I'm sure some people are just "built different" and maintain constant Zen — fdrake

Dicks.

Yep, and this is in line with the common sociological observations about our society of atomism, isolation, and individualism. Sometimes I feel like my interest in philosophy and politics is just an anachronism, like there’s no actual public sphere where any of it could matter. This is a feeling I resist, because I’m an optimist of sorts.

I couldn’t have put it better myself.

But does a self help book really change your perspective, or does it just give you one to try on for a while? That’s pedantic though.

Otherwise, this is an interesting thread because I find myself agreeing with what @T Clark and @Michael have said, which has never happened before.

The complementary blue, rather than orange, is designed to undermine any suggestions of Irishness.

let their actions speak for its value — Mikie

Does that go for Heidegger too?

:up:

In the old forum users could pick their own theme but we can’t implement that here. We can’t even change the background colour of the main discussion area—the white is too bright for me but there’s nothing I can do.

Unfortunately we have members who are in the southern hemisphere, so that would not be fair.

EDIT: I could have worded that better.

Also, I was procrastinating.

merely a random change-up based on being tired with the old purple colour — Benj96

:up:

No symbolism.

By the way I've moved this to the Feedback section.

I am unable to understand that sentence. That is to say … huh?

An interesting alternative example to use is fishing, because fish are lacking in the furry cuteness that evokes our sentimental anthropomorphism.

I don't much like or approve of hunting for sport except for fishing, where you put the fish back alive, or else you kill it only so that you can eat it. So maybe the significant distinction, if there is one, is specifically the killing for sport, which is not a part of fishing.

:lol: :up:

Embrace Your Contradictions: How Hegel’s Science of Logic Can Help You Achieve Wholeness by Owning Your Inner Conflicts

How the Transcendental Doctrine of Elements Can Change Your Life.

Well, I am also in partial agreement.

Unfortunately the thing which distinguishes philosophy from self help and infotainment; argument and systems; is also something which makes philosophy unbearably dry. — fdrake

Isn’t philosophy, at its best, distinguished from self-help by its deep and original insights, rather than, or as well as, by its arguments? Self-help often strikes me as dishonest, manipulative, boring, and essentially individualistic, whereas good philosophy follows the ideas and respects the reader enough to think they can follow too.

My point here is that this actually makes it more exciting. Also, important philosophy is always critical and radical—again, exciting rather than dry.

Having said that, I guess there’s usually a barrier of dryness in presentation.

Rereading Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason by Theodor Adorno, his introductory lecture course given in 1959.

Clear and deep and great fun to read, highly recommended for anyone interested in Kant, whether you’ve read the CPR or not (though some familiarity with the ideas is definitely required).

Was my initial reaction just an instance of snobbery, a kind of intellectual elitism? — Mikie

Is snobbery or elitism always bad? — Tom Storm

Having good taste isn't bad -- but probably being a snob is. — Mikie

Elitism judges the things, snobbery judges the person. Elitism holds up the best for everyone to see and appreciate if they can or want to, but snobbery merely holds up certain credentials as evidence of your superior status and the inferior status of everyone who is not in that class or in-group. Snobbery is always bad, but elitism isn’t.

In this case @Mikie, because you say, “I'd prefer my nephew (and anyone, really) read direct sources,” you’re an elitist but not a snob. You think the primary sources are the best and that your nephew has the potential to read and appreciate them.

On the other hand, Aristotle can be a chore to read, so there’s nothing wrong with making things more digestible. That’s why we read introductions and secondary literature. I think the crucial difference is that pop philosophy, unlike secondary literature, is often dumbed down, written to please people or to catch the attention or to sell books, not to enlighten or teach.

The lack of replies would also lead me to believe no one really finds value in the OP so there's nothing to really learn. — Darkneos

I don’t think so. It’s a good OP. It just takes a bit more time and thought to reply to it compared to many others. I suggest you stop posting in this discussion if you don’t have anything intelligent to say.

One that I found even more philosophical, but sort of sickeningly so, was The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. If the majority of PKD novels feel like weird acid trips, that one was beyond the pale for me. I feel kind of scarred for life on that one, lol. — Noble Dust

This will have to be my next PKD :grin:

I’m curious about the original crime.

I’m upset about this because they gave my posts several approving replies and thumbs-up.

Looks like the original @Hoo was banned seven years ago, in our first year, but I see no problems with their posts and can’t see any mod discussion about banning them.

Mysterious and unfortunate.

... philosophy should seek its contents in the unlimited diversity of its objects. It should become fully receptive to them without looking to any system of coordinates or its so-called postulates for backing. It must not use its objects as the mirrors from which it constantly reads its own image and it must not confuse its own reflection with the true object of cognition. — Adorno, Lectures on Negative Dialectics

Here the significant dimension is concept/object, where the struggle is to get hold of objects without conceptualizing them. This is impossible to do in philosophy, but that's ok, because it's negative dialectics: it's trying to do what Wittgenstein said could not be done, though not with any naively hubristic metaphysical system.

From this perspective, an idea is a conceptual thing in a world of conceptual things called philosophy, or art or culture, or some other more granular "field of sense"--but the philosophical task is to uncover the real. This goes back to my first criticism: it's assumed by Adorno that the real is the material, whether the material is a table, or the relationship between an employer and an employee, or the freedom to flourish. And while these might have different strengths of conceptual flavour, that doesn't matter much, because this is historically relative and there is always in these cases something real in them. So probably the worst move to make is to try so hard to prove the realness of ideas that you invent a whole landscape out of them. That just confuses the concept/object dichotomy and reifies concepts unknowingly, thus obscuring the essential relationship between them.

Yes, I agree unreservedly.

These questions were discussed long before science existed and are interesting in themselves. — Art48

As I said to Wayfarer, despite appearances what I was referring to was not so much ontology as such, or the problem of universals, degrees of reality in Platonism, and so on, but more about the motivations behind the particular ways these ideas appear in contemporary concepts, like the mindscape.

So there’s a scale of thingyness and an independent scale of abstractness. — Jamal

I like considering more than one dimension. — green flag

Two might not be enough but it's better than one, so I made a 2D ontology chart, without much thought as to how pointless or wrongheaded it might be.

This thread has an identity crisis. May I suggest...

"An example of how supply and demand, capitalism and greed corrupt eco ventures, plus what is God?"

Sure, but I was mostly referring to the focus on “exists”.