Saussure & Wittgenstein both seem to echo Herder. Turns out that much of what I like in Hegel goes back to Herder.

In certain ways Herder’s philosophical texts are easier to read than others from the period. For example, he avoids technical jargon, writes in a way that is lively and rich in examples rather than dry and abstract, and has no large, complex system for the reader to keep track of.
...
Herder—especially in the Ideas—laid the foundations for the discipline of linguistics with the following five principles:

Thought is essentially dependent on and bounded by language—i.e., one can only think if one has a language, and one can only think what one can express linguistically.
Meanings or concepts consist (not in referents, Platonic forms, or the subjective mental “ideas” favored by the British Empiricists, but instead) in word-usages.
Humankind exhibits profound differences in modes of thought, concepts, and language, especially between different historical periods and cultures.
Because of principles (1) and (2), investigating the characters of peoples’ languages and their differences from each other is a primary and dependable means for discovering the character of, and the differences between, their modes of thought and concepts. For principles (1) and (2) entail that their languages constitute an empirically accessible and reliable window onto the nature of their modes of thought and concepts.
...
First, Hegel developed his conception of the transition from nature to the (human) mind through a reflection on, and revision of, a position of Herder’s. In the Ideas Herder had argued that human beings (a) exhibit a strong continuity with the “realm of animals” (he even calls the animals their “older brothers”) but (b) are distinguished from it by their possession of spirit, constituting a special “spiritual realm”
...
For another thing, Herder’s rejection in On the Cognition and Sensation of hard and fast divisions between mental faculties, for example, between cognition and sensation or between cognition and volition, led to a similar rejection of such hard and fast divisions in Hegel.
...

Whereas the early Herder of the Treatise on the Origin (like the Enlightenment before him) had implied that languages were mere aggregates of particular words/concepts, in the Ideas he came to emphasize that grammatical structure [Bau] plays a fundamental role in languages.
(1) As we have seen, Herder had already in early works such as On Diligence and the Fragments championed the doctrine that thought is essentially dependent on and bounded by language. In chapters of the Phenomenology of Spirit such as “Sense-certainty”, “Phrenology”, and “The Artificer”, as well as in other works from the Jena period, Hegel assumes the same doctrine (in addition taking over Herder’s further conception that oral language is more fundamental than written). (2) Especially in On the Cognition and Sensation, Herder had championed the theory that language, and therefore also thought, depends on a linguistic community. This position too plays a central role in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit as well as in other works of his. (3) In his Treatise on the Origin Herder had argued that the whole human mind is dependent on thought and hence language, intimately involving them both. Similarly, Hegel in the Phenomenology of Spirit characterizes language as the very “existence [Dasein]” of the subject, or the mind, and he continues to champion this Herderian conception strongly in as late a text as the preface to the second edition of his Science of Logic (1832). (4) In keeping with that position, Herder had championed the thesis in On the Cognition and Sensation that not only language and therefore thought but also the subject depends on a linguistic community.
...
Fourth, Herder exercised a strong influence on Hegel’s philosophy of history. Several components of this influence can be distinguished: (1) Herder had argued in This Too a Philosophy of History that history has a necessary course that works to fulfill a final purpose, then in the Ideas he had identified the purpose in question as the realization of (humanity or) reason. In the Phenomenology of Spirit and his lectures on the philosophy of history Hegel takes over this position and develops it further. (2) Especially in This Too a Philosophy of History Herder had emphasized that the human spirit, or mind, changes in profound ways over the course of history. Hegel adopts this position too, especially in the Phenomenology of Spirit and other works concerned with history. (3) In Attempt at a History of Lyric Poetry (1764), the Fragments (1767/8), and This Too a Philosophy of History (1774) Herder had developed a “genetic” method that undertakes to explain modern spiritual or mental phenomena in terms of their gradual development out of earlier historical origins and antecedents. Hegel subsequently took over this method, especially in his Phenomenology of Spirit (where he discusses his version of it in the preface). (4) Finally, in This Too a Philosophy of History Herder had extended the application of the concept of formation [Bildung] from its then normal use in connection with individuals and their education to humankind and its historical self-development as a whole as well. Hegel takes over this new broader application of the concept of formation in the Phenomenology of Spirit. (This list of Hegel’s debts to Herder is by no means exhaustive.) — link

softwhere

It sounds like you're upset because I dared criticize Marxism. — Apollodorus

It's unfortunate that you misunderstand the situation this way. I'm not especially invested in Marx. He's one of many thinkers who brought philosophy down to earth. I am personally far more attached to Feuerbach, who created a strange brew of mysticism and materialism in his first book, Thoughts on Death and Immortality and wrote the classic Essence of Christianity afterward. I'm interested in how Hegel (who is fascinating but problematic) was brought down to earth (this process continues, consider The Spirit of Trust.)

But you failed to address my points on Marxian concepts like "withering away of the state" which I find rather strange from someone who is so knowledgeable about Marx's teachings. — Apollodorus

I don't claim to be especially knowledgeable. I've just read a few hundred pages and found lots of good stuff in them. For instance, The German Ideology can be hilarious. What I think about most in Marx is the attention paid to the economic aspect of life and its relation to 'ideal' realms like religion and philosophy.

Even Wikipedia doesn't call it "philosophy". — Apollodorus

Karl Heinrich Marx (German: [maʁks]; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883[13]) was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist and socialist revolutionary. — Wiki

I think it would have been much better had you focused on a particular concept to examine and avoided obvious polemical intent. You could have either talked about philosopher kings or some element in Marx's philosophy. Mixing both just looks like crude right-wing propaganda. (You don't want to sound like Tucker Talk.)

.

You might like this one.

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance. The individuals composing the ruling class possess among other things consciousness, and therefore think. Insofar, therefore, as they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of an epoch, it is self-evident that they do this in its whole range, hence among other things rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age: thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch. For instance, in an age and in a country where royal power, aristocracy, and bourgeoisie are contending for mastery and where, therefore, mastery is shared, the doctrine of the separation of powers proves to be the dominant idea and is expressed as an “eternal law.”

The division of labour, which we already saw above as one of the chief forces of history up till now, manifests itself also in the ruling class as the division of mental and material labour, so that inside this class one part appears as the thinkers of the class (its active, conceptive ideologists, who make the perfecting of the illusion of the class about itself their chief source of livelihood), while the others’ attitude to these ideas and illusions is more passive and receptive, because they are in reality the active members of this class and have less time to make up illusions and ideas about themselves. Within this class this cleavage can even develop into a certain opposition and hostility between the two parts, which, however, in the case of a practical collision, in which the class itself is endangered, automatically comes to nothing, in which case there also vanishes the semblance that the ruling ideas were not the ideas of the ruling class and had a power distinct from the power of this class. — GI

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01b.htm

Therefore, like Plato and others, I believe that politicians should be replaced with philosophers. — Apollodorus

It seems to me that you are basically suggesting doing exactly what you are accusing Marx & Engels of doing.

Strange. I'm quoting Marx and Engels, the actual texts. Is that pro-Marx literature? Is The Symposium pro-Plato literature?

Yes, but that's the Marxist view of the issue. I was looking for a more non-partisan perspective. IMO that's the only way to develop an objective critique of Marxism. — Apollodorus

I'm not a partisan, or only inasmuch as I think Marx is worth reading, just like Plato.

n short, could it be that Marxism is not a philosophy but an elaborate hoax designed to help Marx acquire influence and power, a hoax that perhaps started as a prank and later developed into something more serious? — Apollodorus

You might want to read a bio of Marx. I think you'd find this theory highly implausible afterward.

Here's some nice work from Engels, which gives us an idea of how M & E understood Hegel.

Now, according to Hegel, reality is, however, in no way an attribute predictable of any given state of affairs, social or political, in all circumstances and at all times. On the contrary. The Roman Republic was real, but so was the Roman Empire, which superseded it. In 1789, the French monarchy had become so unreal, that is to say, so robbed of all necessity, so irrational, that it had to be destroyed by the Great Revolution, of which Hegel always speaks with the greatest enthusiasm. In this case, therefore, the monarchy was the unreal and the revolution the real. And so, in the course of development, all that was previously real becomes unreal, loses it necessity, its right of existence, its rationality. And in the place of moribund reality comes a new, viable reality — peacefully if the old has enough intelligence to go to its death without a struggle; forcibly if it resists this necessity. Thus the Hegelian proposition turns into its opposite through Hegelian dialectics itself: All that is real in the sphere of human history, becomes irrational in the process of time, is therefore irrational by its very destination, is tainted beforehand with irrationality, and everything which is rational in the minds of men is destined to become real, however much it may contradict existing apparent reality. In accordance with all the rules of the Hegelian method of thought, the proposition of the rationality of everything which is real resolves itself into the other proposition: All that exists deserves to perish.

But precisely therein lay the true significance and the revolutionary character of the Hegelian philosophy (to which, as the close of the whole movement since Kant, we must here confine ourselves), that it once and for all dealt the death blow to the finality of all product of human thought and action. Truth, the cognition of which is the business of philosophy, was in the hands of Hegel no longer an aggregate of finished dogmatic statements, which, once discovered, had merely to be learned by heart. Truth lay now in the process of cognition itself, in the long historical development of science, which mounts from lower to ever higher levels of knowledge without ever reaching, by discovering so-called absolute truth, a point at which it can proceed no further, where it would have nothing more to do than to fold its hands and gaze with wonder at the absolute truth to which it had attained. And what holds good for the realm of philosophical knowledge holds good also for that of every other kind of knowledge and also for practical action. Just as knowledge is unable to reach a complete conclusion in a perfect, ideal condition of humanity, so is history unable to do so; a perfect society, a perfect “state”, are things which can only exist in imagination. On the contrary, all successive historical systems are only transitory stages in the endless course of development of human society from the lower to the higher. Each stage is necessary, and therefore justified for the time and conditions to which it owes its origin. But in the face of new, higher conditions which gradually develop in its own womb, it loses vitality and justification. It must give way to a higher stage which will also in its turn decay and perish. Just as the bourgeoisie by large-scale industry, competition, and the world market dissolves in practice all stable time-honored institutions, so this dialectical philosophy dissolves all conceptions of final, absolute truth and of absolute states of humanity corresponding to it. For it [dialectical philosophy], nothing is final, absolute, sacred. It reveals the transitory character of everything and in everything; nothing can endure before it except the uninterrupted process of becoming and of passing away, of endless ascendancy from the lower to the higher. And dialectical philosophy itself is nothing more than the mere reflection of this process in the thinking brain. It has, of course, also a conservative side; it recognizes that definite stages of knowledge and society are justified for their time and circumstances; but only so far. The conservatism of this mode of outlook is relative; its revolutionary character is absolute — the only absolute dialectical philosophy admits.

— E

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1886/ludwig-feuerbach/ch01.htm

Marxism – philosophy or hoax? — Apollodorus

Hi. Marx and Engels were philosophers. I recommend making no more of the word 'Marxism' than of 'Platonism.'

Let's check if they sound philosophical.

The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behaviour. The same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc., of a people. Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc. – real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process. If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.

In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process. The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life. In the first method of approach the starting-point is consciousness taken as the living individual; in the second method, which conforms to real life, it is the real living individuals themselves, and consciousness is considered solely as their consciousness.

This method of approach is not devoid of premises. It starts out from the real premises and does not abandon them for a moment. Its premises are men, not in any fantastic isolation and rigidity, but in their actual, empirically perceptible process of development under definite conditions. As soon as this active life-process is described, history ceases to be a collection of dead facts as it is with the empiricists (themselves still abstract), or an imagined activity of imagined subjects, as with the idealists.

Where speculation ends – in real life – there real, positive science begins: the representation of the practical activity, of the practical process of development of men. Empty talk about consciousness ceases, and real knowledge has to take its place. When reality is depicted, philosophy as an independent branch of knowledge loses its medium of existence. — GI

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm

Value is the sign as it is determined by the other signs in a semiotic system. For linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, for example, the content of a sign in linguistics is ultimately determined and delimited not by its internal content, but by what surrounds it: the synonyms redouter ("to dread"), craindre ("to fear"), and avoir peur ("to be afraid") have their particular values because they exist in opposition to one another. If two of the terms disappeared, then the remaining sign would take on their roles, become vaguer, less articulate, and lose its "extra something" because it would have nothing to distinguish itself from.

For de Saussure, this suggests that thought is a chaotic nebula until linguistic structure dissects it and holds its divisions in equilibriums. This is akin to the philosophy of Sir William Hamilton, who indirectly influenced Saussure and believed that the mind could only grasp an idea through distinguishing it from something that it is not. He reasoned that the two objects would otherwise collapse together for the mind and become indistinguishable from one another. — link

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_(semiotics)

I think what tempts us to think of language is a nomenclature is that a simply noun like 'cat', understood as a free-floating noun, conjures the image of a cat. It's easy to ignore that this is an atypical rather than prototypical situation. For instance, what images came to mind for those reading the last sentence? How did the 'meaning' flow through that experience of reading?

You might like this:

Schlegel’s critique of first-principle philosophy is rooted (like Novalis’) in a sense of the ungraspability of the absolute or unconditioned. (As Novalis puts it in the first of his “Pollen” fragments: “Everywhere we seek the unconditioned [das Unbedingte], but find only things [Dinge].”) More specifically, Schlegel holds, against Reinhold and Fichte, that “there are no first principles that are universally suitable [zweckmässig] companions and guides to truth” (KA XVIII.518, #13): even “self-evident” propositions can be doubted and so require demonstration (thus opening up an infinite regress), and any proposition can be proved in an “infinite” number of ways. For Schlegel “every proof is infinitely perfectible” (KA XVIII, 518, #9), and the task of philosophy is not one of searching to find an unconditioned first principle but rather one of engaging in an (essentially coherentist) process of infinite progression and approximation.
...
The Schlegelian philosophy that results from this engagement with idealism is non-foundationalist, holistic and historical (see Beiser 2003, 123–26). Schlegel himself describes his philosophical approach as resembling both a circle and epic poetry because it must forever “begin in the middle”: “Philosophy must have at its basis not only an alternating proof [Wechselbeweis] but also an alternating concept [Wechselbegriff]. In the case of every concept, as in the case of every proof, one can in turn ask for a concept and a proof of the same. For this reason, philosophy, like an epic poem, must start in the middle, and it is impossible to pursue philosophy piece by piece starting from a first piece which is grounded and explained completely in and through itself. It is a whole, and thus the path to recognizing it is no straight line but a circle” (KA XVIII, 518). — link

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schlegel/

I found a Roy Harris book that treats Saussure & Wittgenstein together. https://monoskop.org/images/b/be/Roy_Harris_Language,_Saussure_and_Wittgenstein-_How_to_Play_Games_with_Words_1988.pdf

Fitche, Schelling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer all held the same philosophy after you put unnecessary details away. — Gregory

Those details are also known as their philosophies. I think I'll trust Schop when he implies a significant difference.

Hegel, installed from above, by the powers that be, as the certified Great Philosopher, was a flat-headed, insipid, nauseating, illiterate charlatan, who reached the pinnacle of audacity in scribbling together and dishing up the craziest mystifying nonsense. This nonsense has been noisily proclaimed as immortal wisdom by mercenary followers and readily accepted as such by all fools, who thus joined into as perfect a chorus of admiration as had ever been heard before. The extensive field of spiritual influence with which Hegel was furnished by those in power has enabled him to achieve the intellectual corruption of a whole generation. — Schopenhauer

http://afreeleftblog.blogspot.com/2014/01/a-flat-headed-insipid-nauseating.html

FWIW, I think Schop is a great stylist but too hard on Hegel, envious as he was for similar recognition (weep and you weep alone.)

Adding to what Wayf mentioned (H's optimism versus S's pessimism), there's also their treatment of time and history. For Hegel, history matters, is going somewhere bigger & better. For Schop, not so much. He thinks it's enough to have read Herodotus, cuz things just repeat.

Schopenhauer argues that philosophy and religion have the same fundamental aim: to satisfy “man’s need for metaphysics,” which is a “strong and ineradicable” instinct to seek explanations for existence that arises from “the knowledge of death, and therewith the consideration of the suffering and misery of life”

In Feuerbach's first book, which ruined his gig in academia when it was insufficiently-anonymously published, he rails against the personal immortality taught by the theology of his times.

During one brief decade, Sydney Hook writes, the whole of German philosophy and culture stood within Feuerbach’s shadow, "If Hegel was the anointed king of German thought in the period from 1820 to 1840, then Feuerbach was the philosophical arch-rebel from the time of the publication of his Das Wesen des Christenthums to the eve of the revolution of 1848" (Hook 1950, 220). At a time when Hegel was seemingly marching down the history in all glory, Feuerbach caught him in his nakedness by pointing out the unreal nature of his theory. Hegel’s mistake lies in his tendency to treat "abstract predicates—reason, thought, consciousness, and being—as entities." (Harvey 1987, 317) In the Hegelian system, nature exists "only as the alienation of the absolute Idea, as it were a degradation of the Idea." (Engels 1903, 52) For Feuerbach, Hegel’s system was standing on its head; it must be inverted in order to get the simple truth, namely all the predicates are only predicates of existing individual human beings. "[Feuerbach] placed materialism on the throne again without any circumlocution. Nature exists independently of all philosophies." (Engels 1903, 53)

Rather than saying that the Absolute Spirit achieves self-realization by actualizing itself in the finite world, Feuerbach argued that the human spirit obtains self-knowledge by objectifying itself in the idea of God. "Religion is not, as Hegel thought, the revelation of the Infinite in the finite; rather, it is the self-discovery by the finite of its own infinite nature. God is the form in which the human spirit first discovers its own essential nature." (Harvey 1995, 27)
— link

http://people.bu.edu/wwildman/bce/feuerbach.htm

Here's a passage from F's first book (not much is online, but I have the paperback and it's a fascinating, young-man's work, sort of Feuerbach's TLP, him at his most almost-mystical.

Accordingly, once all that is truly actual, universal, substantial, once all Spirit, soul, and essence have disappeared from real life, nature, and world history, once everything has been massacred, has been dissolved into its parts, has been rendered without being, without unity, without Spirit, without soul, then, upon the ruins of the broken world, the individual raises the banner of the prophet and stations the abominable sacred watchman of the belief in his immortality and in the pledge of the hereafter. Standing on the ruins of the present life, in which he sees nothingness, all at once there awaken in the individual the feeling and consciousness of his own inner nothingness; and in the feeling of this double nothingness there flow from him, as from a Scipio on the ruins of Carthage, the compassionate teardrops and soap bubbles of the world of the future. Over the gap that lies between the present life as it really is and his perception and representation of it, over the pores and gaps in his own soul, the individual erects the fools’ bridge of the future life. After he has allowed to wither the fruit trees, the roses and lilies of the present world, after he has sickled away grass, cabbage, and corn and has transformed the whole world into a desiccated field of stubble, there finally springs up, in the empty feeling of his futility and the impotent consciousness of his vanity, as the weak semblance and faint illusion of the living, fresh time when flowers bloom, the nondescript, pale red, faded autumn crocus of immortality. Because nothing exists in the subject but the truthless subject itself, and because nothing exists outside of the subject but the temporal and the transitory, the finite, nothing but that which is false and unreal in the real world, it stands to reason that for the subject the real world is an unreal, future, otherworldly world. For the hereafter is nothing but the mistaken, misconceived, and misinterpreted real world. The subject knows only the shadow, the superficial external appearance of the real world, because he is only shallow and hollow in himself. He mistakes the shadow of the world for the world itself; and his idea of the really true world must be only a shadow, the illusion and fantastical dream of the future world. — F

https://materialreligions.blogspot.com/2015/01/thoughts-on-death-and-immortality.html

What a beautiful question! I answer, to become the God that we think that God ought to be. — tim wood

I agree, and great post in general. The 'divine' virtues are human virtues. It's no accident, I think, that we could only care about a God (view him as other than a tyrant ) to the degree that this 'God' manifests virtues that we already understand and respond to. Hence 'father' metaphors.

I think about the stoics (maybe because of some forgotten line) in terms of trying to carve themselves into a statue of virtue, trying to 'incarnate' the noble, the magnanimous, the serene. In the same way I think 'imitation of Christ' is an attempt to impose a form on dying flesh, a way of life that forgives so as to transcend resentment and selfishness.

But I try, and many people try, and in the trying is progress. And if that's the Godhead of a man or a woman, to have done their best even in the face of the worlds difficulties, then that's not a bad goal and would be quite a lot for anyone to achieve. — tim wood

I agree. I think we can only try but never perfectly or finally succeed, hence the centrality of forgiveness in any free community. I see rationality as a somewhat open & creative enterprise. We bring ideas to one another and try to achieve consensus, but we can't help in doing stepping on one another's toes (preferences, biases, illusions.) Of course sometimes we'll fail because we are greedy or lazy or cowardly. So we forgive as we hope to be forgiven, a specialization of 'do unto others as you'd be done to.'

The worship of God is: Honouring his gifts in other men humans, each according to his genius, and loving the greatest men humans best: those who envy or calumniate great men humans hate God; for there is no other God. — Blake

Yes, but he criticizes Hegel and Schelling for accepting the 'optimistic' view of Christianity — Wayfarer

I actually wrote about that via David Strauss in another thread. Humanists optimized Christianity, made it worldly and optimistic, fused it with the Enlightenment. This is in Kojeve too. Christianity is 'realized' in a free society, no more masters and slaves, no more otherworldly slavish-escapist ideologies. (I don't endorse Kojeve fully, but he's fascinating as a certain extreme.)

And also by his belief that religions, generally - not just Christianity - represent philosophically profound truths in an allegorical way. — Wayfarer

This is something he shares with his hated Hegel. As I read them, myths are a 'lower' intensity but still significant form of an insight that philosophers can and perhaps ought to enjoy in the nudity of the concept.

On the 'we're just animals' them, I think S takes an intermediate position. 'Yeah, we're animals, but we have concepts/language.'

The only essential distinction between the human race and animals, which from time immemorial has been attributed to a special cognitive faculty peculiar to mankind, called Reason, is based upon the fact that man owns a class of representations which is not shared by any animal. These are conceptions, therefore abstract, as opposed to intuitive, representations, from which they are nevertheless derived. — Schop

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/50966/50966-h/50966-h.htm

I'll interject that near as I can tell seeking God always ends up with us. In terms of God, we're always the only being behind the curtain. — tim wood

That's exactly how I see it, agreeing with Feuerbach that God is a projection of human virtues.

"We have met him and he is us!" So it's not incarnation so much as a matter of being and becoming. — tim wood

You mention becoming. Becoming what? What is the goal? Is it to become the being what we (implicitly) already are? I think talk about 'God' was talk about us all along. For context, I've been an atheist so long that I don't get the heebie geebies when handling the Christian tradition (not meant to suggest that you do.) An issue that interest me is the 'religious' charge of the concept of rationality itself, which functions as a sort of 'Holy Spirit' that is ideally universally accept as that which determines the real (whether and how it is real.) The philosopher is one for whom only the rational is real, and who would transform the real into that which is rational.

Taken as an intelligible (geistig) or an abstract being, that is, regarded neither as human nor as sensuous, but rather as one that is an object for and accessible only to reason or intelligence, God qua God is nothing but the essence of reason itself. But, basing themselves rather on imagination, ordinary theology and Theism regard him as an independent being existing separately from reason. Under these circumstances, it is an inner, a sacred necessity that the essence of reason as distinguished from reason itself be at last identified with it and the divine being thus be apprehended, realized, as the essence of reason. It is on this necessity that the great historical significance of speculative philosophy rests.The proof of the proposition that the divine essence is the essence of reason or intelligence lies in the fact that the determinations or qualities of God, in so far as they are rational or intelligible and not determinations of sensuousness or imagination, are, in fact, qualities of reason.

“God is the infinite being or the being without any limitations whatsoever.” But what cannot be a limit or boundary on God can also not be a limit or boundary on reason. If, for example, God is elevated above all limitations of sensuousness, so, too, is reason. He who cannot conceive of any entity except as sensuous, that is, he whose reason is limited by sensuousness, can only have a God who is limited by sensuousness. Reason, which conceives God as an infinite being, conceives, in point of fact, its own infinity in God. What is divine to reason is also truly rational to it, or in other words, it is a being that perfectly corresponds to and satisfies it. That, however, in which a being finds satisfaction, is nothing but the being in which it encounters itself as its own object.He who finds satisfaction in a philosopher is himself of a philosophical nature. That he is of this nature is precisely what he and others encounter in this satisfaction. — Feuerbach

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/feuerbach/works/future/future0.htm

And while primitive thinking may have understandably personified God, then forgetting they made Him, transferring the error to us, there seems little justification for any reasonable modern one of us to persist in the error. — tim wood

Personally I agree that primitive notions of God should be abandoned by 'reasonable' people. You also mention modern. This is the historical becoming element, which acknowledges the march of reason, or its descent from the non-human into contingency and flesh. It's a sin against the 'holy spirit' of rationality to be stuck at a previous phase of the incarnation (how I'd fit in w/ the above.)

It's a delicate operation tho to tease out exactly what this or that individual means by 'God.' For me it's one of the great words in English, to be handled with caution but not simply thrown away (else the return of the repressed, etc.) I'm for the continual reinterpretation of what often only seems to be the rearview, inasmuch as it seems relevant. (The future has primacy for us, and talk of the past is really talk about the future, just as talk about gods is really talk about us.)

Continuing, we get to the clear abandonment of the old theology.

Though I may conceive that the divine spirit in a state of renunciation and abasement becomes the human, and that the human nature in its return into and above itself becomes the divine; this does not help me to conceive more easily, how the divine and human natures can have constituted the distinct and yet united portions of an historical person. Though I may see the human mind in its unity with the divine, in the course of the world’s history, more and more completely establish itself as the power which subdues nature; this is quite another thing, than to conceive a single man endowed with such power, for individual, voluntary acts. Lastly, from the truth, that the suppression of the natural existence is the resurrection of the spirit, can never be deduced the bodily resurrection of an individual.

We should thus have fallen back again to Kant’s point of view, which we have ourselves found unsatisfactory: for if the idea have no corresponding reality, it is an empty obligation and ideal. But do we then deprive the idea of all reality? By no means: we reject only that which does not follow from the premises. If reality is ascribed to the idea of the unity of the divine and human natures, is this equivalent to the admission that this unity must actually have been once manifested, as it never had been, and never more will be, in one individual? This is indeed not the mode in which Idea realizes itself; it is not wont to lavish all its fulness on one exemplar, and be niggardly towards all others—to express itself perfectly in that one individual, and imperfectly in all the rest: it rather loves to distribute its riches among a multiplicity of exemplars which reciprocally complete each other—in the alternate appearance and suppression of a series of individuals. And is this no true realization of the idea? is not the idea of the unity of the divine and human natures a real one in a far higher sense, when I regard the whole race of mankind as its realization, than when I single out one man as such a realization? is not an incarnation of God from eternity, a truer one than an incarnation limited to a particular point of time.

This is the key to the whole of Christology, that, as subject of the predicate which the church assigns to Christ, we place, instead of an individual, an idea; but an idea which has an existence in reality, not in the mind only, like that of Kant. In an individual, a God-man, the properties and functions which the church ascribes to Christ contradict themselves; in the idea of the race, they perfectly agree. Humanity is the union of the two natures—God become man, the infinite manifesting itself in the finite, and the finite spirit remembering its infinitude; it is the child of the visible Mother and the invisible Father, Nature and Spirit; it is the worker of miracles, in so far as in the course of human history the spirit more and more completely subjugates nature, both within and around man, until it lies before him as the inert matter on which he exercises his active power; it is the sinless existence, for the course of its development is a blameless one, pollution cleaves to the individual only, and does not touch the race or its history. It is Humanity that dies, rises, and ascends to heaven, for from the negation of its phenomenal life there ever proceeds a higher spiritual life; from the suppression of its mortality as a personal, national, and terrestrial spirit, arises its union with the infinite spirit of the heavens. By faith in this Christ, especially in his death and resurrection, man is justified before God; that is, by the kindling within him of the idea of Humanity, the individual man participates in the divinely human life of the species. Now the main element of that idea is, that the negation of the merely natural and sensual life, which is itself the negation of the spirit (the negation of negation, therefore), is the sole way to true spiritual life.

This alone is the absolute sense of Christology: that it is annexed to the person and history of one individual, is a necessary result of the historical form which Christology has taken. Schleiermacher was quite right when he foreboded, that the speculative view would not leave much more of the historical person of the Saviour than was retained by the Ebionites. The phenomenal history of the individual, says Hegel, is only a starting point for the mind. Faith, in her early stages, is governed by the senses, and therefore contemplates a temporal history; what she holds to be true is the external, ordinary event, the evidence for which is of the historical, forensic kind—a fact to be proved by the testimony of the senses, and the moral confidence inspired by the witnesses. But mind having once taken occasion by this external fact, to bring under its consciousness the idea of humanity as one with God, sees in the history only the presentation of that idea; the object of faith is completely changed; instead of a sensible, empirical fact, it has become a spiritual and divine idea, which has its confirmation no longer in history but in philosophy. When the mind has thus gone beyond the sensible history, and entered into the domain of the absolute, the former ceases to be essential; it takes a subordinate place, above which the spiritual truths suggested by the history stand self-supported; it becomes as the faint image of a dream which belongs only to the past, and does not, like the idea, share the permanence of the spirit which is absolutely present to itself. Even Luther subordinated the physical miracles to the spiritual, as the truly great miracles. And shall we interest ourselves more in the cure of some sick people in Galilee, than in the miracles of intellectual and moral life belonging to the history of the world—in the increasing, the almost incredible dominion of man over nature—in the irresistible force of ideas, to which no unintelligent matter, whatever its magnitude, can oppose any enduring resistance? Shall isolated incidents, in themselves trivial, be more to us than the universal order of events, simply because in the latter we presuppose, if we do not perceive, a natural cause, in the former the contrary? This would be a direct contravention of the more enlightened sentiments of our own day, justly and conclusively expressed by Schleiermacher. The interests of pity, says this theologian, can no longer require us so to conceive a fact, that by its dependence on God it is divested of the conditions which would belong to it as a link in the chain of nature; for we have outgrown the notion, that the divine omnipotence is more completely manifested in the interruption of the order of nature, than in its preservation. Thus if we know the incarnation, death and resurrection, the duplex negatio affirmat, as the eternal circulation, the infinitely repeated pulsation of the divine life; what special importance can attach to a single fact, which is but a mere sensible image of this unending process?
— Strauss

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/64037/64037-h/64037-h.htm#s150
The surprising part here is that 'Christ' is or is becoming lord of this world thru science & technology, so that Christianity is blended with a myth of thisworldly progress. Schopenhauer might object that Christianity is being transformed here into an optimistic religion. We in 2021 might have more dread of technology and look back nostalgically on a time that believed in a Star Trek future.

How does this connect to the OP? Rationality is the Holy Spirit now.

I thought I'd add some perhaps little-remembered thought from David Strauss to the quote above. A theme that continues to fascinate me is the emergence of humanism from the 'absolute religion,' which features the incarnation myth with which we are all (too?) familiar.

Man being once mature enough to receive as his religion the truth that God is man, and man of a divine race; it necessarily follows, since religion is the form in which the truth presents itself to the popular mind, that this truth must appear, in a guise intelligible to all, as a fact obvious to the senses: in other words, there must appear a human individual who is recognised as the visible God. This God-man uniting in a single being the divine essence and the human personality, it may be said of him that he had the Divine Spirit for a father and a woman for his mother. His personality reflecting itself not in himself, but in the absolute substance, having the will to exist only for God, and not at all for itself, he is sinless and perfect. As a man of Divine essence, he is the power that subdues nature, a worker of miracles; but as God in a human manifestation, he is dependent on nature, subject to its necessities and sufferings—is in a state of abasement. Must he even pay the last tribute to nature? does not the fact that the human nature is subject to death preclude the idea that that nature is one with the divine? No: the God-man dies, and thus proves that the incarnation of God is real, that the infinite spirit does not scorn to descend into the lowest depths of the finite, because he knows how to find a way of return into himself, because in the most entire alienation of himself, he can retain his identity. Further, the God-man, in so far as he is a spirit reflected in his infinity, stands contrasted with men, in so far as they are limited to their finiteness: hence opposition and contest result, and the death of the God-Man becomes a violent one, inflicted by the hands of sinners; so that to physical degradation is added the moral degradation of ignominy and accusation of crime. If God then finds a passage from heaven to the grave, so must a way be discoverable for man from the grave to heaven: the death of the prince of life is the life of mortals. By his entrance into the world as God-man, God showed himself reconciled to man; by his dying, in which act he cast off the limitations of mortality, he showed moreover the way in which he perpetually effects that reconciliation: namely, by remaining, throughout his manifestation of himself under the limitations of a natural existence, and his suppression of that existence, identical with himself. Inasmuch as the death of the God-man is merely the cessation of his state of alienation from the infinite, it is in fact an exaltation and return to God, and thus the death is necessarily followed by the resurrection and ascension.

The God-man, who during his life stood before his cotemporaries as an individual distinct from themselves, and perceptible by the senses, is by death taken out of their sight; he enters into their imagination and memory: the unity of the divine and human in him, becomes a part of the general consciousness; and the church must repeat spiritually, in the souls of its members, those events of his life which he experienced externally. The believer, finding himself environed with the conditions of nature, must, like Christ, die to nature—but only inwardly, as Christ did outwardly,—must spiritually crucify himself and be buried with Christ, that by the virtual suppression of his own sensible existence, he may become, in so far as he is a spirit, identical with himself, and participate in the bliss and glory of Christ. — Strauss

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/64037/64037-h/64037-h.htm#s150

We might think of this as the rationalization of Christian myth. What was once understood as a history of supernatural events is reinterpreted as a metaphor for the immanent transcendence of our petty selves.

pneuma being a very fine kind of material, representing the generative and intelligent aspect of Nature. — Ciceronianus the White

Basically I was describing humanism in terms of the incarnation myth. Metaphorically we are 'God' in the process of getting himself born. Or, 'we' (an ideal we) are universal rationality making itself explicit to itself as such. I don't think of some otherworldly substance, & for me incarnation gestures toward the move from transcendence-as-alienation toward immanence-as-homecoming. I like the feel of the stoics. I think their close (humanist cosmopolitans?) .I am lately fired up about Saussure's emphasis that the social fact (Durkheim) of language (AKA geist) involves 'form not substance.' He sees thoughtstuff and soundstuff as two 'postulated' continua that are 'sliced up' simultaneously by systems of semantically interdependent signs. 'Transcendence' is the impossible idea of concept without soundbody. 'Immanence' is recognizing what was thought to be transcendent as a 'form' that cannot be isolated from its 'flesh' (the breath or the ink in which we signal.)

a shorthand way of trying to communicate the idea that regardless of your circumstances, be at peace with the world. And that is elusive. — Wayfarer

While I suspect that tranquility can never be completely independent of circumstances (food poisoning, torture, and so on), I very much respect it as an ideal to strive toward. For those in good health and not in immediate danger, it's perhaps envy, resentment, and dread that especially threaten such tranquility. I remember some great passages in Plotinus, so I dig some up here.

The soul that beholds beauty becomes beautiful.

We are not separated from spirit, we are in it.

God is not external to anyone, but is present with all things, though they are ignorant that He is so.

Life is the flight of the alone to the alone. — Plotinus

I can (creatively mis-)read this in terms of the incarnation theme I mentioned earlier. If 'God' is a still-developing being who articulates himself thru and only thru and in mortals, then 'His' medium or mother is materiality, our flesh, of course, but especially the breath of the sign, as opposed to the 'ideality' of its form, not substance. For this enformed breath is the medium of our (God's) self- knowledge and self-enlargement. The flight from the Alone to the Alone is (in this reading) the journey from 'God' back to 'God,' from implicit membership in a divinized, liberated human community to explicit membership. This journey would occur historically (for the culture/species as a whole) and individually (as a person lets go the attachments/alienations that obscure this participation.) This is how I read the denial of our separation. 'Alone' works for 'God' because it's only the whole of reality that's not dependent: 'the finite has no genuine being.' You can probably smell the Hegel in this. I actually found a quote that I put in the Saussure thread. Plotinus discusses meaningful sound, the (ideal) form (not substance) that makes air significant. I think we are both interested in 'form' and the realm of the intelligible or significant. For me we already 'swim' in it, 'are' it, and simply make it more explicit through linguistics, philosophy, music (thinking vocals especially), and so on. We strive so that we can see beauty and so be beautiful (noble, tranquil), beyond resentment-envy-dread --as often and as intensely as we can manage such a delicate operation.

Let us begin with speech. It is subject to measurement, but only in so far as it is sound; it is not a quantity in its essential nature, which nature is that it be significant, as noun and verb are significant. The air is its Matter, as it is Matter to verb and noun, the components of speech.

To be more precise, we may define speech as an impact [made upon the outer air by the breath], though it is not so much the impact as the impression which the impact produces and which, as it were, imposes Form [upon the air]. Speech, thus, is rather an action than a quantity- an action with a significance. Though perhaps it would be truer to say that while this motion, this impact, is an action, the counter-motion is an experience [or Passion]; or each may be from different points of view either an action or an experience: or we may think of speech as action upon a substrate [air] and experience within that substrate.

If however voice is not characteristically impact, but is simply air, two categories will be involved: voice is significant, and the one category will not be sufficient to account for this significance without associating with a second. — Plotinus

http://classics.mit.edu/Plotinus/enneads.6.sixth.html

I think the 'form' is a social fact, a living convention. To say it's ideal is not IMV to add someother realm or substance (tho realm is a tempting metaphor here.) It's better perhaps to think of thoughtsound as an original unity that's only 'falsely' analyzed into 'impossibly' separate aspects.

Not sure if anyone wants to pull this thread with me, but, returning to artistic esotericism, I'd like to share some mystagogic music.

...to attain its infinity the spirit must all the same lift itself out of purely formal and finite personality into the Absolute; i.e. the spiritual must bring itself into representation as the subject filled with what is purely substantial and, therein, as the willing and self-knowing subject. Conversely, the substantial and the true must not be apprehended as a mere ‘beyond’ of humanity, and the anthropomorphism of the Greek outlook must not be stripped away; but the human being, as actual subjectivity, must be made the principle, and thereby alone, as we already saw earlier , does the anthropomorphic reach its consummation.
...
The true content of romantic art is absolute inwardness, and its corresponding form is spiritual subjectivity with its grasp of its independence and freedom. This inherently infinite and absolutely universal content is the absolute negation of everything particular, the simple unity with itself which has dissipated all external relations, all processes of nature and their periodicity of birth, passing away, and rebirth, all the restrictedness in spiritual existence, and dissolved all particular gods into a pure and infinite self-identity. In this Pantheon all the gods are dethroned, the flame of subjectivity has destroyed them, and instead of plastic polytheism art knows now only one God, one spirit, one absolute independence which, as the absolute knowing and willing of itself, remains in free unity with itself and no longer falls apart into those particular characters and functions whose one and only cohesion was due to the compulsion of a dark necessity.

...the determinate being of God is not the natural and sensuous as such but the sensuous elevated to non-sensuousness, to spiritual subjectivity which instead of losing in its external appearance the certainty of itself as the Absolute, only acquires precisely through its embodiment a present actual certainty of itself. God in his truth is therefore no bare ideal generated by imagination; on the contrary, he puts himself into the very heart of the finitude and external contingency of existence, and yet knows himself there as a divine subject who remains infinite in himself and makes this infinity explicit to himself. — link

source

That's us, 'God,' down in the very heart of finitude, godless otherwise in the fuzz & funk.

It makes more sense to me think of different aspects of reality as opposed to saying something is more real than some other thing. — Manuel

:up:

But I think the idea that 'modern science' has, or even can, address, let alone 'solve', those questions, is misplaced. Which is no slight on science. Consider what is involved - they are not questions for science. They are questions we have to grapple with 'alone with the alone'. — Wayfarer

I think (roughly) that only scientism thinks science can replace philosophy, and that philosophy has made genuine progress, at the cost perhaps of mystical charge in Parmenides' fragments.

I do see a problem in alone with the alone. Language is fundamentally social. 'Knowledge' has something like a continuum of appropriate uses which are generally out of the control of any individual. Subcultures can of course extend or change usage so that 'knowledge' is something like a metaphor for an ineffable 'insight.' But even here the word has a use. Members can discuss what 'knowledge' is/means and how to figure out who has it. As I see it, the truly alone person is beyond language, beyond argument, beyond epistemology --and not really a person anymore but either a superhuman or an animal (beast or god.)

the Greek equivalent of the Sanskrit 'Vidya', which carries existential implications that mere 'knowledge' does not. — Wayfarer

You may underestimate how well that is understood. For some the problem is the obvious religious 'charge' here, not because religion is universally dis-valued but rather because of the perceived likelihood of bias. One might even imagine rationality as a negotiation between clashing spiritualities. On my view, the generation of myths for coping is spontaneous. I do not use 'myths' pejoratively here. They are to philosophy what models are to science (they are fundamental metaphors that control, often tacitly, the approach to less fundamental myths/metaphors.) For instance, we had/have the myth of the given (Sellars). We had/have the myth/metaphor of cognition as a mirror of nature, or as a lens through which 'raw' reality passes before it gets to us. Let's not forget that story about the ghost in the machine either.

The issue is their 'reasonable' collision and whether or not a consensus is even sought.

I thought so & hoped you wouldn't mind the criticism.

I found a nice essay on the evolving notion of rationality, which treats something like the 'melt' of the faculty-conception into a norm-conception. Let me also note that 'gentleman's agreement' is a hyperbole on my part.

I want to focus on how the predominant understanding of rationality began to shift during the period of Atwater’s history that corresponds to our own “high Enlightenment”. In histories of Atwater, this era is often referred to as “the age of reason”. But while it was an era with a great affection for reason, it was also a period in which traditional conceptions of reason and rationality came under increasing strain.

This, in considerable part, was the product of the emergence of a new conception of “reasonableness”, which developed in tandem with early forms of probability theory. The key feature of this new notion of reasonableness was that, contrary to previous models of rationality, it allowed reasonable belief to be based on merely probable, as opposed to demonstratively certain, grounds. Thus, the traditional conception of rationality, which focused on modes of intuition and reasoning capable of producing certain knowledge, was gradually replaced by a conception of reasonableness, on which being reasonable was fundamentally a matter of responding correctly to uncertainty in the face of less than fully conclusive evidence.

The rise of this conception of reasonableness was associated with important developments in areas ranging from theology to political economy. But a few aspects of it are particularly important for our story here. First, the rise of this probabilistic conception of reasonableness was closely tied to a growing skepticism about the forms of intellectual intuition or rational insight that were characteristic of more robust, rationalist conceptions of reason as a faculty. Indeed, the focus on probability was in some sense a replacement for more robust conceptions of reason or the intellect. For, in the absence of the forms of rational intuition that produced certain knowledge of substantive truths, the best human beings could do seemed to be to respond as reasonably as possible to our mixed and uncertain empirical evidence about the nature of things. Thus, as the scope of reason to deliver certainty become more limited, it was only natural for an increasing interest in merely probable grounds for belief to take its place.

In this way, the move to a probabilistic conception of reasonableness was part of a general trend towards a more modest understanding of the faculty of reason and, by extension, rationality itself. — link

http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0100-60452018000400501

I'd add to this probabilistic theme the linguistic turn. We became more aware also of the intrinsic ambiguity of thought-sound itself. The metaphoricity 'behind' or at the 'root' of concepts is yet another destabilization of the idea of a faculty with machine precision. IMV, all that's left of this precision is math ('a generalization of chess'), which still needs to be linked as a dead formal system to worldly application with the usual noisy-metaphorical thought-sound.

(I've missed you in the Saussure thread. The guy is a radical metaphysician in his way.)

I've found if you ask two Buddhists about Buddhism you get 3 contradictory answers, — Daemon

:starstruck:

the insistence of scientific rationalism as criteria for philosophical or 'spiritual' practices amounts to a form of regulation. — Wayfarer

I do agree with you here. The evolving and ever hazy concept of rationality is itself an in-the-works product of that very rationality which is to be further articulated. We're still figuring out what the rules are for making the rules, a project which would not make sense if we didn't already have a rough idea. 'Logic is a gentleman's agreement.' That is to say: more decency than faculty.

Here are some passages that are almost metaphysical. I wrote about the 'saxofoam' (my term) of 'thought-sound' (So-sure's) in the Blue Book thread before deciding to start this thread.

To prove that language is only a system of pure values, it is enough to consider the two elements involved in its functioning: ideas and sounds.

Psychologically our thought—apart from its expression in words—is only a shapeless and indistinct mass. Philosophers and linguists have always agreed in recognizing that without the help of signs we would be unable to make a clear-cut, consistent distinction between two ideas. Without language, thought is a vague uncharted nebula. There are no pre-existing ideas, and nothing is distinct before the appearance of language.

Against the floating realm of thought, would sounds by them selves yield predelimited entities? No more so than ideas. Phonic substance is neither more fixed nor more rigid than thought; it is not a mold into which thought must of necessity fit but a plastic substance divided in turn into distinct parts to furnish the signifiers needed by thought. The linguistic fact can therefore be pictured in its totality—i.e. language—as a series of contiguous subdivisions marked off on both the indefinite plane of jumbled ideas (A) and the equally vague plane of sounds (B). The following diagram gives a idea of it:

[NICE IMAGE. FOLLOW LINK TO SEE]

The characteristic role of language with respect to thought is not to create a material phonic means for expressing ideas but to serve as a link between thought and sound, under conditions that of necessity bring about the reciprocal delimitations of units. Thought, chaotic by nature, has to become ordered in the process of its decomposition. Neither are thoughts given material form nor are sounds transformed into mental entities;the somewhat mysterious fact is rather that “thought-sound" implies division, and that language works out its units while taking shape between two shapeless masses. Visualize the air in contact with a sheet of water; if the atmospheric pressure changes, the surface of the water will be broken up into a series of divisions, waves; the waves resemble the union or coupling of thought with phonic substance.

Language might be called the domain of articulations, using the word as it was defined earlier (see p. 10). Each linguistic term is a member, an articulus in which an idea is fixed in a sound and a sound becomes the sign of an idea.

Language can also be compared with a sheet of paper: thought is the front and the sound the back; one cannot cut the front with out cutting the back at the same time; likewise in language, one can neither divide sound from thought nor thought from sound; the division could be accomplished only abstractedly, and the result would be either pure psychology or pure phonology.

Linguistics then works in the borderland where the elements of sound and thought combine; their combination produces a form, not a substance.
...
Everything that has been said up to this point boils down to this: in language there are only differences. Even more important: a difference generally implies positive terms between which the difference is set up; but in language there are only differences without positive terms. Whether we take the signified or the signifier, language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic difference that have issued from the system. The idea or phonic substance that a sign contains is of less importance than the other signs that surround it....

But the statement that everything in language is negative is true only if the signified and the signifier are considered separately; when we consider the sign in its totality, we have something that is positive in its own class. A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas; but the pairing of a certain number of acoustical signs with as many cuts made from the mass thought engenders a system of values; and this system serves as the effective link between the phonic and psychological elements within each sign. Although both the signified and the signifier are purely differential and negative when considered separately, their combination is a positive fact; it is even the sole type of facts that language has, for maintaining the parallelism between the two classes of differences is the distinctive function of the linguistic institution.
...
When we compare signs—positive terms—with each other, we can no longer speak of difference; the expression would not be fitting, for it applies only to the comparing of two sound-images, e.g. father and mother, or two ideas, e.g. the idea “father” and the idea “mother”; two signs, each having a signified and signifier, are not different but only distinct. Between them there is only opposition. The entire mechanism of language, with which we shall be concerned later, is based on oppositions of this kind and on the phonic and conceptual differences that they imply.
...
What is true of value is true also of the unit (see pp. 110 ff.). A unit is a segment of the spoken chain that corresponds to a certain concept; both are by nature purely differential.

Applied to units, the principle of differentiation can be stated in this way: the characteristics of the unit blend with the unit itself. In language, as in any semiological system, whatever distinguishes one sign from the others constitutes it. Difference makes character just as it makes value and the unit.
Putting it another way, language is a form and not a substance (see p. 113). This truth could not be overstressed, for all the mistakes in our terminology, all our incorrect ways of naming things that pertain to language, stem from the involuntary supposition that the linguistic phenomenon must have substance. — S

http://faculty.smu.edu/dfoster/cf3324/saussure.htm

The conceptual side of value is made up solely of relations and differences with respect to the other terms of language, and the same can be said of its material side. The important thing in the word is not the sound alone but the phonic differences that make it possible to distinguish this word from all others, for differences carry signification.

This may seem surprising, but how indeed could the reverse be possible? Since one vocal image is no better suited than the next for what it is commissioned to express, it is evident, even a priori, that a segment of language can never in the final analysis be based on anything except its noncoincidence with the rest. Arbitrary and differential are two correlative qualities.

In addition, it is impossible for sound alone, a material element, to belong to language. It is only a secondary thing, substance to be put to use. All our conventional values have the characteristic of not being confused with the tangible element which supports them. For instance, it is not the metal in a piece of money that fixes its value. A coin nominally worth five francs may contain less than half its worth of silver. Its value will vary according to the amount stamped upon it and according to its use inside or outside a political boundary. This is even more true of the linguistic signifier, which is not phonic but incorporeal—constituted not by its material substance but by the differences that separate its sound-image from all others.
— Sausure

http://faculty.smu.edu/dfoster/cf3324/saussure.htm

Constituted by differences. A sign is (only) what it is not. Somewhat analogously, money is not 'really' paper or numbers on a computer but what you can do with it, its role in society.

Compare this with:

The background and foil for this article was the position, dominant at the time, that axiomatic set theory provides the foundation for modern mathematics, including allowing us to identify all mathematical objects with sets. For example, the natural numbers 0, 1, 2, … can be identified with the finite von Neumann ordinals (starting with ∅ for 0 and using the successor function f:x→x∪{x}); similarly, the real numbers can be identified with Dedekind cuts constructed set-theoretically. Arithmetic truths are then truths about these set-theoretic objects; and this generalizes to other mathematical theories, all of whose objects are taken to be sets as well.

According to Benacerraf, such a set-theoretic foundationalist position misrepresents the structuralist character of arithmetic in particular and of mathematics more generally. To begin with, instead of working with the finite von Neumann ordinals, we can equally well work with the finite Zermelo ordinals (starting again with ∅ for 0 but using the alternative successor function f:x→{x}); and there are infinitely many other choices that are equivalent. Similarly, instead of working with a set-theoretic construction of the real numbers in terms of Dedekind cuts, we can work with a construction based on equivalence classes of Cauchy sequences on the rational numbers as suggested by Cantor and others. This basic observation is hard to deny, and even set-theorist foundationalists can agree with it (more on that below). But Benacerraf draws some further, more controversial conclusions from this basic observation.

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”. — link

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/structuralism-mathematics/

Roughly, the part is constituted by the whole and not the other way around, and the whole is a system of relationships between the parts. The parts are not fixed in their 'materiality.' Some kind of 'medium' is necessary but the details are contingent. They only have significance through relationship which requires a recognizable difference from one another.

what the object of that quest was - the attainment of certain knowledge of the real. — Wayfarer

I think this project is haunted by an inescapable ambiguity, as argued for by an army of philosophers who I think have made a strong case. Is this a not 'a closer walk with God'?' I like applying thy incarnation myth/metaphor to the march of humanist thought. 'Atheistic' humanism incorporates the incarnation myth, lives it. We're already 'God,' as much as I think we can have, as much as I think we need, down here, tho (felix culpa) not in a finished state, not dead.

just because a term can be defined differently by different users of the term doesn't entail that some uses of that term cannot be more apt or warranted by evidence and the broader historical context than others. — 180 Proof

:up:

Liberal secularism itself is a violent regulator of 'private' belief. You can believe whatever you like, provided do yo not believe that your personal beliefs are actually objectively true, or matter in any public way.

Sorry, Wayf, but this seems way off to me. In (relatively) free (relatively) democratic societies, a person can vote their conscience, for the prohibition of abortion or divorce or porn or weed and so on. They might not get what they want, but that's democracy. They can believe whatever they want to believe, evangelize or discuss, but this comes at the cost of others being able to believe and say things they don't like.

I agree that 'free' societies 'carve out' a private sphere. What they regulate is regulation itself, as in my neighbor doesn't get to force me to pray to Allah/Jehova/Hubbard or burn my Koran/Bible/Dianetics.

FWIW, I think it hurts the case you want to make to shoot at such a wide and venerable target (a freeish society).

It is even more curious when we consider that the practical consequences have been widely drawn, indeed had been drawn thousands of years before Saussure, for it is only through the concept of a difference between form and substance that we can explain the possibility of speech and writing existing at the same time as expressions of one and the same language. If either of these two substances, the stream of air or the stream of ink, were an integral part of the language itself, it would not be possible to go from one to the other without changing the language. — Uldall

https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/derrida.htm

By air or ink, the 'same' language, despite entirely different mediums, one for the ear and one for the eye.

A little more on the equivalence classes or (ideal) sound images:

It is well-known that Saussure distinguishes between the “sound-image” and the objective sound. He thus gives himself the right to “reduce,” in the phenomenological sense, the sciences of acoustics and physiology at the moment that he institutes the science of language. The sound-image is the structure of the appearing of the sound [l'apparaître du son] which is anything but the sound appearing [le son apparaissant]. It is the sound-image that he calls signifier, reserving the name signified not for the thing, to be sure (it is reduced by the act and the very ideality of language), but for the “concept,” undoubtedly an unhappy notion here; let us say for the ideality of the sense... The sound-image is what is heard; not the sound heard but the being-beard of the sound. Being-heard is structurally phenomenal and belongs to an order radically dissimilar to that of the real sound in the world. — Derrida

The ideality or structure in the sound image refers to the classification implicit in the 'hearing thru' the particular pronunciation (otherwise a mess of sound, a yawp) to the pronounced word. This is the recognition of the 'same' cultural object in an 'actually' unique vibration of the air. I say 'unique' because I doubt we ever pronounce the same word the same way twice (exactly the same way.) The chaos of sound is as if immediately broken into repeatable 'cultural objects.'

The temptation might be to leap to talk of the 'ego' or 'soul' or 'consciousness,' but these signs are endangered by Saussure's systematic thought. Do we know what we are talking about? What is ideality? IMV, Saussure is one of those thinkers who makes us aware of an inescapable ambiguity in our speaking...but compared to what unclear fantasy of clarity? Math? Chess? Dead formalism apart from our use of it? Our taking it up in our lifeworld, our passions?

Like I said, fair or not. Even adult-looking sex-dolls are somewhat taboo. I imagine that most users don't advertise their use of such dolls. Even legal/ordinary porn is an iffy thing to bring up. That said, I do think Shaffer makes some good points. It's not a hill I'd want to die on, tho.

Food for thought on the Sage:

Only in the misery of man lies the birthplace of God. Only from man does God derive all his determinations; God is what man desires to be; namely, his own essence and goal imagined as an actual being. Herein, too, lies the distinguishing factor separating the neo-Platonists from the Stoics, the Epicureans, and the Sceptics. Existence without passion, bliss, independence from need, freedom, and autonomy were also the goals of these philosophers, but only as virtues of man; this means that these goals were based on the truth of the concrete and real man. Freedom and bliss were supposed to belong to this subject as its predicates. Hence, with the neo-Platonists – although they still regarded pagan virtues as true – these predicates became subject; that is, human adjectives were turned into something substantial, into an actually existing being – hence the distinction between the neo-Platonist and Christian theology which transferred man's bliss, perfection, or likeness to God into the beyond. Precisely through this, real man became a mere abstraction lacking flesh and blood, an allegorical figure of the divine being. Plotinus, at least on the evidence of his biographers, was ashamed to have a body. — link

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/feuerbach/works/future/future1.htm

Classic empiricism is indeed crude by today's standards (well demolished even by secular thinkers.) But it's as if you are criticizing a brand new Tesla by talking about a Model T.