Strange that Jung of all people accepts such a standard metaphysical view. — Mikie

I think that Jung makes that statement in the context of seeing psychology as a departure from the framework of 'rationalist philosophies'. In On the Nature of the Psyche, he wrote extensively upon the resistance against accepting models of the mind involving unconscious processes. Here are some of his remarks concerning German Idealism:

The soul was a tacit assumption that seemed to be known in every detail. With the discovery of a possible unconscious psychic realm, man had the opportunity to embark upon a adventure of the spirit, and one might have expected that a passionate interest would be turned in this direction. Not only was this not the case at all, but there arose on all sides an outcry against such an hypothesis. Nobody drew the conclusion that if the subject of knowledge, the psych, were in fact a veiled for of existence not immediately accessible to consciousness, then all our knowledge must be incomplete, and moreover to a degree that we cannot determine. The validity of conscious knowledge was questioned in an altogether different and more menacing way than it had ever been by the critical procedures of epistemology. The latter put certain bounds to human knowledge in general, from which post-Kantian German Idealism struggled to emancipate itself; but natural science and common sense accommodated themselves to without much difficulty, if they condescended to notice it at all. Philosophy fought against it in the interests of an antiquated pretension of the human mind to be able to pull itself up by its own bootstraps and know things outside the range of human understanding. The victory of Hegel over Kant dealt the gravest blow to reason and to the further development of the German and, ultimately, of the European mind, all the more dangerous as Hegel was a psychologist in disguise who projected great truths out of the subjective sphere into a cosmos he himself had created. We know how far Hegel's influence extends today.....

Hegel offered a solution of the problem raised by epistemological criticism in that he gave ideas a chance to prove their unknown power of autonomy.They induced that hybris of reason which led to Nietzsche's superman and hence to the catastrophe that bear the name of Germany. Not only artists, but philosophers too, are sometimes prophets.....

The peculiar high-flown language Hegel uses bears out this view: it is reminiscent of the megalomanic language of schizophrenics, who us terrific spellbounding words to reduce the transcendent to subjective form, to give the banalities the charm of novelty, or pass off commonplaces as searching wisdom. So bombastic a terminology is symptom of weakness, ineptitude, and lack of substance. But that does not prevent the latest German philosophy from using the same crackpot power-word and pretending it is not unintentional psychology. — Jung, On the Nature of the Psyche, 358

Okay, Carl, now tell us how you really feel.

The separation Jung is making here is surely worthy of being challenged. I brought it up to note that he explicitly acknowledges what he is departing from rather than making a replacement narrative.

I think Aristotle is framing eternity as a limit that we cannot approach without seeing our condition as unable to think about it past a certain point. In Physics, he says:

It is also worth inquiring how time is related to the soul and why time is thought to exist in everything, on the earth and on the sea and in the heaven. Is it not in view of the fact that it is an attribute or a possession of a motion, by being a number (of a motion), and the fact that all these things are movable? For all of them are in a place, and time is simultaneous with a motion whether with respect to potentiality or with respect to actuality.
One might also raise the problem of whether time would exist not if no soul existed; for, if no one can exist to do the numbering, no thing can be numbered. So if nothing can do the numbering except a soul or the intellect of a soul, no time can exist without the existence of soul, unless it be that which when existing, time exists, that is if a motion can exist without a soul. As for the prior and the posterior, they exist in motion; and they are time qua being numerable. — Physics, 223a15, translated by HG Apostle

So whatever 'eternity' is, it is not simply an infinite amount of what we have a little bit of. That conceptual boundary is touched upon in the De Anima passage I quoted explaining we can have no memory of the agent intellect as itself. Our thinking requires both the active and the passive working together.

The limit is also expressed in Aristotle saying:

Actual knowledge is identical with its object. But potential knowledge is prior in time in the individual, but not prior even in time in general; for all things that come to be are derived from that which is so actually. — De Anima, 431a1

Our experience of potential knowledge is exactly not what is suggested by Anamnesis in Plato:

Above all, one might go over the difficulties raised by this question: What do the Form contribute to the eternal beings among the sensibles or to those which are generated and destroyed? For they are not the cause of motion or change in them. And they do not in any way help either towards the knowledge of the other things (for the are not substances of them; otherwise they would be in them) or towards their existence (for they are not present in the things which share them). — Metaphysics, 1079b11, translated by HG Apostle

I don't know if this approach toward an eternal being is a theology or not but it is clearly different from a creation story which gives us a beginning to measure time with or a 'chain of realities' as depicted by Plotinus.

Perhaps you meant this:
Ousia
The term οὐσία is an Ancient Greek noun, formed on the feminine present participle of the verb εἰμί, eimí, meaning "to be, I am" — Fooloso4

That leads me to think that my instincts were correct, and that the notion of origin is based upon a convention of the lexicon rather than a thesis regarding parts of speech in respect to how the word was actually used.

I am glad that Pantagruel brought this up because it has been bugging me for decades.

One response I have gotten when I complained about academic publications is surprise that I cared. "Why do you want to know about what is happening in the context of our dialogue?"
There are many who do know why but I figure the surprise is part of the status quo..

That makes it similar but different than issues of copyright in music and literature.

I understood the quoted passage to be saying that the Latin word existere was too much like gignesthai (coming to be) for it to express the sharp contrast to that word given through the use of einai in Greek.

In Liddel and Scott's lexicon, the third use given for the word is: "to be as opposed to appearing to be, as esse to videri, τὸν ἐόντα λόγον, the true story, Herodotus." I think that captures the emphatic quality Kahn is talking about.

Which "etymological dictionary" are you referring to? In Liddel and Scott, verbs are given according to their form as 1st person singular, active voice, in the present tense unless there is a reason not to do that. I don't know why the convention was established. The groovy new Cambridge lexicon (which I do not possess) uses the same convention but lists some parts of speech separately when it clarifies a specific use. The idea that one part of speech is more 'original' than another in the use of a verb is new to me. I am keen to see that argument in action if you can cite the source of it.

I don't know if there is an initiation into a 'gnosis' in Parmenides' thinking. It is interesting that Socrates refused to disparage him the way he kicked Heraclitus and Protagoras around in Theaetetus. Be that as it may, Parmenides is a poster child for Kahn's point about the strong separation between the language of Being from the language of Becoming:

Necessarily therefore, either it simply Is or it simply Is Not. Strong conviction will not let us think that anything springs from Being except itself. Justice does not loosen her fetter to let Being be born or destroyed, but holds them fast. Thus our decision must be made in these terms: Is or Is Not. Surely by now we agree that it is necessary to reject the unthinkable unsayable path as untrue and to affirm the alternative as the path of reality and truth. — Parmenides, Way of Truth,7, Wheelwright collection (Emphasis mine)

it appears like you never got to the point of understanding the consistency the way that I do. — Metaphysician Undercover

That is certainly one possible explanation.

I am torn in this regard. People work and they should get paid.
There are particular points of entry that get charged a certain amount. I have not seen a rent version where one could access all the sites carte blanche.

If you have not had this experience through doing meditation, what does it being reported by another person require from you?

This distinction between potential and actual should be considered through Spinoza's actual statements:

I also want to say something here about the intellect and the will that we commonly attribute to God. If intellect and will do belong to the eternal essence of God, we must certainly mean something different by both these attributes than is commonly understood. For an intellect and a will that constituted the essence of God ​would have to be totally different from our intellect and will and would not agree with them in anything but name – no more in fact than the heavenly sign of the dog agrees with the barking animal which is a dog. I prove this thus. If intellect does belong to the divine nature, it will not be able, as our intellect is, to be posterior (as most believe) or simultaneous by nature with what is understood, since God is prior in causality to all things (by p16c1). To the contrary truth ​and the formal ​essence of things are ​such precisely because they exist as such objectively in the intellect of God. That is why God’s intellect, insofar as it is conceived as constituting God’s essence, is in truth the cause both of the essence of things and of their existence. ​This seems to have been noticed also by those who have maintained that the intellect, the will and the power of God are one and the same thing. — Spinoza: Ethics, Scholium to proposition 17, translated by M Silverthorne and MJ Kisner

I looked for support for your idea in the paper and did not find it. Perhaps you could point to what appealed to you.

The essay is interesting and I will quote the part I think speaks to Aristotle's project:

To put the matter in a nutshell, the ontological vocabulary of the Greeks lead them to treat the existence of things and persons as a special case of the Bestehen von Sachverhalte. It is remarkable that not only onta but every other Greek word for "fact" can also mean "thing", and vice versa:-(Cf. chremata = pragmata in the fragment of Protagoras; ergon in the contrast with logos: "in fact" and "in word" gegonota as the perfect of onta, etc.) This failure on the part of the Greeks (at least before the Stoics) to make a systematic distinction between fact and thing underlies the more superficial and inaccurate charge that they confused the "to be" of predication with that of existence.
It may be thought that the neglect of such a distinction constitutes a serious shortcoming in Greek philosophy of the classical period. But it was precisely this indiscriminate use of einai and on which permitted the metaphysicians to state the problem of truth and reality in its most general form, to treat matters of fact and existence concerning the physical world as only a part of the problem (or as one of the possible answers), and to ask the ontological question itself: What is Being? that is, What is the object of true knowledge, the basis for true speech? If this is a question worth asking, then the ontological vocabulary of the Greeks, which permitted and encouraged them to ask it, must be regarded as a distinct philosophical asset. — Charles Kahn

If I had been in Kahn's class as this lecture unfolded, I would have asked about how this feature of the language should be understood against the background of Aristotle's specific statements about predication and demonstration in his Metaphysics and elsewhere.

I don't agree with the way you characterize the differences between agencies in Aristotle.

We argued about this extensively last year after you posted your thesis.

I still have to say what I said then:
"When I piece together what you ascribe to Aristotle, I don't understand it as a thought by itself."

Leaving aside your detractors in the past, I have trouble matching your distinction between ontology and epistemology with Aristotelian and Platonic texts.

Is there some portion of that text that does that for you?

Are you guys referring to a specific OP?

I think one has to study Spinoza directly in order to better comprehend the nuances and depths of his conceptions which are not nearly as Anselmian (i.e. of Catholic scholasticism) as Copelston's mention of "the ontological argument" might suggest. — 180 Proof

In my reading of Spinoza, I was continually struck by how it opposed the views of Anselm.

Thinking of God is not something you could not conceive of without a lot of help but was rather the first thing that came to mind. Too easy because this God had all of the prejudices anyone had.

It does lend support for that claim.

It is interesting to me that the language in De Anima is more directed to recognizing different kinds of agency than coming to terms with a chain of causality. The distinctions being made about how the soul works are being measured by those who are ensouled: Change happens in this way in some situations but in other ways in others. A desire to be informed by our conditions, as well as they can be described at any time.

I feel your pain.
Oftentimes I have stood on the wrong side of the glass watching academics cavort freely with what I cannot afford.

It is a problem for science even if one does not aim to reduce consciousness into an epiphenomenon.

It seems to me that the looking at all reduction as a closure is also a closure. I read Aristotle as trying to open doors on his terms. The failing of the Scholastics was to read him as the answer to everything.

But if consciousness (active intellect) is deathless and everlasting then it does not emerge in an interaction, it is employed.

You say the active intellect is a "personal capacity", as if the ongoing controversies have been settled. As Joe Sachs points out:

... in Metaphysics, Book XII, ch.7-10. Aristotle again distinguishes between the active and passive intellects, but this time he equates the active intellect with the "unmoved mover" and God.
— Wikipedia, Active Intellect — Fooloso4

In addition to discussing where the activity emerges from, the agent intellect is presented as a limit to what can be called a 'personal capacity':

In separation it is just what it is, and this alone is immortal and eternal. (But we do not remember because this is unaffected, whereas the passive intellect is perishable, and without this nothing thinks. — Aristotle, De Anima, 430a18, translated by DW Hamlyn

The activity that brings our being into life is experienced through our thinking but not as something happening to us or a show we remember seeing. The activity that is immortal is not a personal dimension but is what allows all thinkers to think. What each of us experiences as thinking would not be possible without the agent. But that experience would also not be possible without the perishable individual. The perishable individual Aristotle is talking about lives in time:

Actual knowledge is identical with its object. But potential knowledge is prior in time in the individual, but not prior even in time in general; for all things that come to be are derived from that which is so actually. — ibid. 431a1

The things that come to be are either shaped by a process outside of them or sustained by an activity proper to their being. We particular individuals cannot know the Nous as itself, but we can distinguish between different types of potentiality:

It is clear that the object of perception makes that which can perceive actively so instead of potentially so; for it is not affected or altered. Hence this is a different form from movement; for movement is the activity of the incomplete, while activity proper is different, the activity of the complete. — ibid.431a4

From here, it is clear why Sachs says the formal cause is more than an intention like a plan to build a house before it is made.

After setting my previously expressed peevishness aside, I became curious about your thinking in terms of periods of time. Why is it an example of the Enlightenment instead of an expression of Scholastic philosophy?

Are you likening that to Russia hankering for Kiev without consulting them?

If your Chez is actually attacked, and you choose to fight the attackers, that could reasonably be called self-defense. As a concept, that is not co-extensive with the question of boundaries, but neither are the ideas mutually exclusive of each.

This embrace sounds like an obsession to harm oneself, using one kind of pain to distract from another.

It appears to be an inversion of the Bushido acceptance of death that frees you from fear and increases your ability to act. Your version seems uninterested in action, more like Dostoyevsky's Notes from the Underground.

I see that my questions about life did not interest you.

You have mapped the problem to your satisfaction.

I see/hear your challenge to the thesis of the OP. I agree with an element of it but also am trying to challenge your statements. Are we, perhaps, talking past each other?

I figure this sort of thing has always been difficult to talk about.

A "cause", is by your definition, outside of any stakeholders in how claims of right happen. That puts the Magna Carta and the American Civil Rights outside of whatever you have in mind.

The exclusion makes it hard to engage with your proposition.

There are many ways to hurt oneself and the compulsion to do so can take on a life of its own. But I don't want to compare your shadow with a darker one. Dostoevsky and Kafka can teach you enough about that.

I would rather ask you about what you enjoy. Does your work life completely bum you out or is there some portion that which is your art? And if you have that small portion, can you make it larger? Are you curious about what you do not know? Are you in love with anybody? If so, is it reciprocal?

These questions have kicked the ass of generations of mankind for time out of mind. I expect straight A's on those before considering your fascination with self-destruction.

I am disappointed by this remark.

It is one thing to challenge a point of view and another to ask for shared judgement in your register.

Isaac has repeatedly argued that Ukrainians are not enough of a self-identified group to say they are making a decision to act in self-defense together toward a common enemy. So anything you might refer to as "moral" on those grounds witl have to be excluded in order to be considered.

Best of luck.

I wanted to point out that Bateson's statement goes beyond your observation regarding us being social animals. If the image of a Cartesian self is a mind stuck in a particular body is at one end of the scale, Bateson is looking at mind at the opposite end that excludes anthropomorphic models of an activity.

A certain stripe of 'physicalist' and 'meta-physicalist' needs the Cartesian end in order to claim title to a contested real estate. That fades away pretty quickly when one leaves the pool of Narcissus. That is why I responded to your post about Nietzsche to wonder about the uses of 'laws of nature'. They require a formal introduction to any party they are invited to.

Humans evolved as cooperative social creatures. Like many other mammals, we are born with certain moral emotions , such as the protection of our young and the ability to experience pain at the suffering of others in our group. Sacrificing oneself for the protection of others is seen in other animals. Anthropologists hypothesize that conscience evolved in order to protect tribes from the violence of alpha males. Even behaviors which on the surface appear unadaptive, such as suicide or homicide, are driven by a combination of such moral emotions.

It is not the self strictly defined as a body, that our biologically evolved motivational processes are designed to preserve. Rather, it is social systems ( friendship, marriage, family, clan) that sustain us and that we are primed to defend. — Joshs

In regards to the boundaries of 'self', it is interesting to consider Bateson's view on the 'unit of evolutionary' change:

Let us start from the evolutionary side. It is now empirically clear that Darwinian evolutionary theory contained a very great error in its identification of the unit of survival under natural selection. The unit which was believed to be crucial and around which the theory was set up was either the breeding individual or the family line or the subspecies or some similar homogeneous set of conspecifics. Now I suggest that the last hundred years have demonstrated empirically that if an organism or aggregate of organisms sets to work with a focus on its own survival and thinks that is the way to select its adaptive moves, its "progress" ends up with a destroyed environment. If the organism ends up destroying its environment, it has in fact destroyed itself. And we may very easily see this process carried to its ultimate reductio ad absurdum in the next twenty years. The unit of survival is not the breeding organism, or the family line, or the society.

The old unit has already been partly corrected by the population geneticists. They have insisted that the evolutionary unit is, in fact, not homogeneous. A wild population of any species consists always of individuals whose genetic constitution varies widely. In other words, potentiality and readiness for change is already built into the survival unit. The heterogeneity of the wild population is already one-half of that trial-and-error system which is necessary for dealing with environment.

The artificially homogenized populations of man's domestic animals and plants are scarcely fit for survival.

And today a further correction of the unit is necessary. The flexible environment must also be included along with the flexible organism because, as I have already said, the organism which destroys its environment destroys itself. The unit of survival is a flexible organism-in-its-environment. — Gregory Bateson, Form, Substance, Difference

While this is not the same as Nietzsche's view of nature, perhaps it touches upon Nietzsche's dislike of the 'survival of the fittest' model because it did not express the superfluity or over-abundance of life.

Isn't this 'actively cultivating suffering' a fetish indistinguishable from other possible fascinations?

Why does the human want to live a happy life instead of a miserable one if they lead to the same end? — MojaveMan

Because it is more fun.

Agreed. I read De Anima as a continuation of that thought. Our life is this life too.

This provides nothing to the discussion. Only contempt.
I bet you are capable of more than that.

I figure what Sachs is asking is whether you can have your cake and eat it too in the matter of life "being wholes" or the result of a fundamental process that was set up to permit those beings. In that regard, Aristotle is starting with a connection rather than having to presuppose one.

One of the topics constantly haggled over in the Groundhog Day cycle of arguments that has been this OP for a year concerns the credibility of evidence. You clearly favor one side of the arguments.

Characterizing all challenges to that view as coming from unquestioning slaves to a narrative is a well-honed rhetorical device. Pardon me if I lapse into a coma when it is used yet again.

Skinner did not deny it existed, he said it did not cause change.

I only brought it up because you mentioned it. The theory is as dumb as a bag of rocks.

Nietzsche suggested we could understand the “mechanistic world as a kind of life of the drives”. — Joshs

I was thinking about that while reading the essay offered upthread by Fooloso4: The Battle of the Gods and the Giants by Joe Sachs. Nietzsche's objection to laws of nature was not a rejection of natural causes but a protest against how they are imagined. It is interesting to hear Sachs make a parallel observation regarding Aristotle's understanding of nature:

When Aristotle says that nature acts for ends, he explains this by saying that the end is the form. Things have natures because they are formed into wholes. The claim is not that these natural wholes have purposes but that they are purposes. Every being is an end in itself, and the word telos, that we translate as end, means completion. When we try to judge Aristotle's claim that nature acts for ends, we tend to confuse ourselves in two ways. First, we imagine that it must mean something deliberates and has
purposes. Second and worse, we begin with our mathematically conceived universe, and can't find anything in it that looks like a directedness toward ends. But Aristotle indicates that it is just because ends are present in nature that a physicist cannot be a mathematician. We have seen that even change of place becomes impossible in mathematical space. But there are three other kinds of motion, from which the mathematician is even more hopelessly cut off, without which activity for the sake of ends would be impossible. Things in the world are born, develop, and grow. Genuine wholes, which are not random heaps, must be able to come into being, take on the qualities appropriate to their natures, and
achieve a size at which they are complete. But mathematical objects can at most be combined, separated, and rearranged. If we have first committed ourselves to a view of the world as being extended lumps in a void, there is no way to get wholes or ends back into the world. That means in turn that the question of ends has to come first, before one permits any choice to be made that empties the world of possibilities. — Joe Sachs

This is not what Nietzsche is saying exactly in his objection to metaphysics nor is he rejecting modern methods, but it is another way to ask what laws of nature refer to in our picture of a caused world.

One year into a war instigated and prolonged by the United States. — Mikie

Sounds pretty certain.

I think it shows how reading a lot of philosophy books is probably a complete waste of time for most people. — Mikie

Is very contemptuous.

It can be taken away from you at a moment's notice.

Preparation for death makes sense if you believe what you do now will change a future outcome. But that cannot be a certainty but only a belief. If you do not believe that is the case, there is nothing to prepare for.

We do not prepare for what is certain, we prepare for what we anticipate, a meal this evening, a hot date tomorrow, the stone wall I will build next week, the writing I hope to understand in a year's time. Etcetera.