Of course they do. In what other world would they lie?

They do not lie in the perceived world.

A thing-in-itself is still just a thing. — Mww

No. Things in themselves are neither apriori nor aposteriori. They are not empirical, not in time and space; just postulates. Pure reason is only shown in our visible affairs. They themselves cannot be witnessed.

It is true that the names "A" and "B" don't tell me as much as the names "the colour red" and "the colour green", but they do tell me something, that "A" and "B" exist and that "things-in-themselves" exist. — RussellA

That will be a tough sell. Things-in-themselves, for Kant, did not lie in the perceptual world at all. But this here sounds more like Husserl's things-themselves, referring to the eidetically structured visual presence before one's eyes. Philosophers today tend away from this kind of thing, which suggests some kind of non propositional knowledge of red that is there prior language and naming.

My understanding of Kant on this point is that if the world is timeless and without space, objects are eternal and the becoming we see is like the motion of the experience of motion pictures. The vase is real but it's eternity acting as becoming, presence showing life. We don't really know what things are in eternity but we can speak of them while in time by observing them acting outside eternity. Try not asking first what noumena is and instead focus time and space being intuitions. Then maybe noumena come into focus — Gregory

Kant wouldn't put it like that, but there is something close in what you say. His question really is, how are apriori synthetic judgments possible? Take causality: before me lies a context of causally related things, like two pool balls on a collision course with each other. Causality explains the possibility of their altered trajectories at the time of impact. But can you even imagine one pool ball just changing course all by itself? This not just a case of pure logicality, of agreement in a tautology; this is in-the-world impossiblity. Regarding things out there, among the trees and lamp posts, I have knowledge that is apodictic, as Kant put it, apriori, universally and necessarily true, and this isn't supposed to happen. KNowledge about the world like this should be at best inductively acquired. How do we know about gravity? We observe the world and things fall to the grounded repeatedly and without exception. But this doesn't mean things MUST fall to the ground. They just do. But causality tells you something must be the case, just as logic does, e.g., modus ponens or the principle of contradiction.

How does one account for this apriori knowledge IN the outside world? Apriority is supposed be confined to mental constructions. It must be that the outside world isn't "outside" in the usual sense at all. The perceiving agency must be making a contribution to its empirical existence.

Anything that bears the mark of apriority must have its origin in the perceiver's mind, and this goes for time and space, the very formal conditions for the possibility of objective experience. Space and its geometry, time and its sequential structure, both have apriority in their analysis.

Seems clear to me that that is precisely the wrong way around. We do not go from propositional and cognitive understanding to non-propositional and non-cognitive understanding. There is no such thing as non-cognitive understanding. There is such thing as non-propositional thought, belief, knowledge, and understanding. It's what precedes the propositional. — creativesoul

It is a tough cookie, but take the cognitive dimension of a model proposition like: the cup is on the table. What is the cognitive part of this? It lies with the understanding, in the Kantian way of putting it, and as he says, the synthetic work of the mind to apply universal concepts like 'cup' in an instantiation. I would point out the "blind" sensory intuition ("intuitions without concepts are blind") part of the equation. Put it ike this: in order for this to make any sense at all it has to be that one cna even talk about intuitions absent a concept, but this is impossible, because such talk would itself possess a "blind" claim. Kant can't talk alike this, in other words, for this is just nonsense to talk of a blind anything in this way.

But, and here is the point, we clearly CAN talk like this. I can apprehend the, call it X that is designated by the term 'red'. There is a presence I can existentially grasp as something that, while held within the cognitive act, is identified as altogether noncognitive.
This opens the door to certain existential claims Kant never imagined.

Kant's response to Hume was that we ARE time and space. Both held the world to be phenomena but Kant held that world to be inside us in a sense. If we are time and space than the world would appear to us falsely because we usually experience time and especially space as outside us. Hence the noumena is the world minus time and space — Gregory

What does one make of this Kantian claim? AN excellent question for me is, How does one reasonably defend the limitation of what stands outside phenomena, if one's perspective is solely within phenomena. That is, how is it that this notepad stands outside the ontology of what is absolutely real? It would require the real to be somehow exclusive of this notepad, which sound absurd, because such a line would require an understanding on both sides to makes sense and a line (Wittgenstein made an argument like this in his Tractatus).

...to there... from where exactly? — creativesoul

Well, this is the question. One might say, with Derrida, that since there is no center from which springs the basis for all meanings, nothing inscribed in the world that gives the world to our understanding, we stand rudderless in a fathomless no where. But then, Derrida didn't exactly mean for this to be altogether a nihilation, for it does a kind of apophatic job of ridding us of thought and discovering actuality. It may be from a context or determinate form, and to the same, but then, there is also in this realization an opportunity to terminate the invocation of context entirely. LIke a Buddhist might do. This leads to a disclosure of a radically different kind.

Phenomenology :
1.the science of phenomena as distinct from that of the nature of being.
2. an approach that concentrates on the study of consciousness and the objects of direct experience. — Gnomon

Number one is a powerful statement. Being here refers to what can be "totalized" or assimilated into a system of understanding. I thing does not appear before one at all without it being a part of a totality, a matrix of contextual embeddedness. No object has this "stand alone" non categorical status, for context is an epistemic necessity. The question is never whether this "eidetic horizon of structures" is there to constitute the knowldege experience, because this structure is what makes intelligibility possible. The question is, IN this matrix of possibilities (Heidegger's potentiality of possibilities) can one encounter the world of actualities ('actuality' being itself a contextualized partical of language)?

A massively interesting question. Is there anything prohibitive about language being the "opening" to the world, that which makes things "unhidden" (alethea is the Greek term) to us and that defines our radical finitude, that makes the "leap" (Kierkegaard) to a non cognitive and non propositional understanding impossible?

I hold the answer to be, no, there is nothing prohibitive like this about language and logic and the context nature of knowing.

It wasn't that this distinction was lost on him, but that in his philosophy, the terms signify different aspects of the world. He uses pheomena in the standard sense as 'what appears'. Noumena is a different matter and a source of both controversy and confusion. First, etymology - 'noumenal' means 'an object of nous', which is usually translated as 'intellect' albeit with different connotations to the modern equivalent. The Oxford Companion to Philosophy says "Platonic Ideas and Forms are noumena, and phenomena are things displaying themselves to the senses... This dichotomy is the most characteristic feature of Plato's dualism; that noumena and the noumenal world are objects of the highest knowledge, truths, and values is Plato's principal legacy to philosophy." — Wayfarer

Definitions of terms I don't hold with any great value. Heidegger went to the Greeks because he found something closer to the phenomenological account he was trying to put together which was intended to distance philosophy from traditional metaphysics. But to him, Plato's metaphysics was the first step away from the "primordial" world of what lies originally before one prior to philosophy. I am interested in this primordiality and not in other realms of possibility. To me the theory of forms places the grounding of what is real in this world "elsewhere". Take a look at that infamous Third Man Argument, the one about a form including itself, ad infinitum: This is close to Wittgenstein's objection to logic being able conceive of itself: in order to understand what logic is as logic, one would have to assume a perspective apart from logic; but then, to understand this, one would have to assume yet another perspective, and so on. This is the kind of thing that a rationalist metaphysics will produce. It is nonsense to think.

Plato is entertaining to read, but little help for understanding the world. And historical definitions only muddle things: concepts are open, not closed affairs, and this is radically true for concepts like noumena and phenomena. One must ask about the context Kant was in when postulating noumena. Talk about pure forms of the categories of pure reason as the ultimate grounding for reality is a flat out dismissal of experience as we know it, and this "as we know it" is all there is from which a metaphysics can be determined. The noumena/phenomena distinction he discusses has to be abandoned, as do all such talk of an impossibly distant metaphysics.

Kant's introduced the concept of the “thing in itself” to refer to reality as it is independent of our experience of it and unstructured by our cognitive constitution. The concept was harshly criticized in his own time and has been lambasted by generations of critics since. A standard objection to the notion is that Kant has no business positing it given his insistence that we can only know what lies within the limits of possible experience. But a more sympathetic reading is to see the concept of the “thing in itself” as a sort of placeholder in Kant's system; it both marks the limits of what we can know and expresses a sense of mystery that cannot be dissolved, the sense of mystery that underlies our unanswerable questions. Through both of these functions it serves to keep us humble.

I have come across a lot of such things and they all miss the direction of metaphysics in the givenness of phenomena. One has to put aside tradition suggested by this passage altogether. You are in the history of philosophy, this puts the discussion in a context of academic interest, like writing a paper about who said what and how things are different, arguing one way or the other.

What is needed is a method, not an argument. Of course, one has to argue for the method, but this insists on a descriptive approach to the world, and Kant is useful for this. He just left out the part about the world, as Schopenhauer alludes. However, the direction Kant took is now basic to responsible thinking in philosophy: ontology follows on epistemology. And for this, one has to be descriptively responsible, like a scientist, committed to the evidence that lies before one, and no more or less, for knowing is an integral part of what there, in the phenomenon. This does harken back to Plato, no? See Theaetetus where we get the ancient equation for knowledge as justified true belief. The reason those absurd Gettier problem analytic philosophers obsessed about (still do?) is because they simply refused to admit that there is no P in S knows P, independent of justification. We are bound to P and P to us in the construction of P.

Consider this from Michel Henry's Essence of Manifestation:

Phenomenology is the science of phenomena. This means that it is a
description anterior to all theory and independent of all presuppositions,
of everything that presents itself to us as existant, regardless of order
or domain. Understood as a description, phenomenology inrplies the
rejection of all hypotheses, of all principles having some unifying
value, whether real or supposed, with regard to some area of knowledge,
and finally, the rejection of a sector of reality which would contain
in it a rule of intelligibility as a necessary condition for its existence

I offer this only as an indication of the way I think philosophy must move forward. Henry jumps directly to Husserl's reduction. This reduction is, as I see it, the only way OUT of philosophical inertia. How so? The drive is toward, well, the thing itself! The terminal point where indeterminacy falls away.

This, I argue, is exactly what being Buddhist is all about. And I hasten to add that this idea finds agreement in the literature, in the Buddhist philosophical tradition, only to the extent that is it has its justification in the clear exposition of phenomena. A term like noumena is simply absorbed in the discovery. This is not about an historical thesis or a paper on Kant.

Pitiful, ain’t it? Just as ol’ Henry didn’t understand production efficiency. Landry didn’t understand football. Gandhi didn’t understand civil rights. Wright didn’t understand buildings. Just what we of the vulgar understanding didn’t realize we always needed, huh? Another fool coming along, disrupting the status quo, knocking us from our collective intellectual comfort zone. — Mww

I love irony, but spell it out for this fool. The question is, why am I saying Kant didn't understand metaphysics? I also insist Kant knew nothing of the essence of ethics. Indeed, he had no understanding of the generational basis for ethics at all. His position rests on unexamined presuppositions. This as well can be discussed.

My issue with his transcendental idealism is that it entirely fails to grasp the Wittgenstieniam point that if someting is affirmed to be true, then we have to be able to make sense of it not being true. This is why he refused to discuss ethics and metaphysics in terms of value and "the world." Their denial makes no sense. This is another way of saying they are not contingent terms, but absolutes, that is, simply givens int he world. Kant didn't understand that what is transcendental is what is right before one's perceptions IN the empirical phenomenon. His exposition on synthetic judgments was important, of course, but he didn't ask why it is that one simply must postulate noumena; he didn't face the requirement that given that all we ever experience is phenomena, the term must have its grounding IN phenomena.

This is borne out in post Husserlian thinkers like Michel Henry. Husserl posited that the object, this candle in front of me, stands, without the intentional epistemic cord to constitute a relationship, as a transcendental object, which simply means it is there and away from me and transcends me. Kant's world had the Real noumenal X entirely beyond recognition. Husserl starts with what is clearly there, in the phenomenal event that is originally given, and the candle is not questioned for its distance "over there". Fink called Husserl's method the completion of Kant's Copernican Revolution. See the way he opens his SIxth Meditation:

.....the phenomenological reduction, brought us into the d imension in which we stand before the problem-field of philosophy. Instead of inquiring into the being of the world, as does traditional "philosophy" dominated by the dogmatism of the natural attitude, or, where inquiry is not satisfied with that, instead of soaring up over the world "speculatively," we, in a truly "Copernican revolution," have broken through the confinement of the natural attitude, as the horizon of all our human possibilities for acting and theorizing, and have thrust forward into the dimension of origin for all being,

The ineffability that inspires the transcendental positing is an actual threshold for Fink, where analysis can go and reveal. You see here here Fink talks in dramatic terms like "the dimension of origin for all being." Analytic philosophers rolls their eyes skyward at something like this. But then, that is all they do, because they simply cannot and will not deal with the world. They only deal with arguments.

Put another way, a metaphysic is a statement of what must be the case, in order for the world to be as it is. Most analytical philosophy deprecates such endeavours, on the grounds that the world is all that is the case. Hence

it pleases some of us to 'find' meaning, and others not to find meaning.
— Tom Storm — Wayfarer

That statement sounds Kantian, the extrapolation from phenomena to an impossible metaphysics. I don't really disagree, because it is right to say that there is more to what IS the case. I take the matter differently: When we observe the world and its phenomena, the metaphysics is not on the other side, so to speak, of what is witnessed, impossible to reach perceptually, but making for sound and necessary postulation. Rather, the radically "other" lies undisclosed, as if forgotten, IN what appears. Kant's "concepts without (sensory) intuitions and empty; intuitions without concepts are blind" rests on the assumption that normal, ordinary apprehensions of the world are all that can constitute experience, and the idea that the noumenal was identical to the phenomenal was entirely lost on him. Noumena entails phenomena, is a way to put it, for the term is supposed to be what really IS real, and therefore cannot have this exclusivity. But this leaves the matter in the hands of logic and speculation about what 'noumena' means, and this doesn't really make the most important point about metaphysics. This latter is IN the actuality of the encounter with phenomena. This is the idea. One has to step out of Heidegger's dasein, out of being. Literally leave this world, if the world is defined as he defines it; a suspension of all assumptions. We are in the mystics world.

Tom Storm is right. But why are we so different? Meaning is discovered in the openness of what Heidegger called gelassenheit, a term associated with the Amish and others, referring to a yielding and suspending of one's understandiing's insistence. He even refers to Meister Eckhart in his Discourse on Thinking. Some may be naturally inclined to take to continental thinking, like myself; but others certainly can be intellectually persuaded for the objective case is there. Husserl was no mystic. Nor was Heidegger. Kierkegaard? I don't think so. But their thinking is rich with metaphysics.

A Case for Transcendental Idealism :
By ‘transcendental idealism’, I just mean the original view, plus my interpretation of it, made by Immanuel Kant; which starts with the core idea that we cannot know what is ‘transcendent’ to us (viz., what may exist completely independently of our representative faculties) but, rather, only what is ‘transcendental’ (viz., the necessary preconditions for the possibility of experience) . . . .
Quote from OP
Note --- Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle says that we "we cannot know both the position and speed of a particle, such as a photon or electron, with perfect accuracy". But we don't have to fantasize those properties, we can interpolate them ("what may exist") from observational evidence. Physics is about what we can know via the physical senses. Metaphysics is about that which transcends the capabilities of our senses. The fact that our senses have limitations is not a fantasy. For example, invisible Oxygen is an interpretation of relevant evidence, not a perception --- yet it's essential for life. Likewise, electrons have never been seen or photographed, but they are essential for material properties. The orbit "image" below is calculated from mathematical data, not from visible light. — Gnomon

Caught my eye, this one. Consider: An alternative way to think about metaphysics would be this: it is not that our senses have limitations, nor about what we can know via the physical senses nor about transcending the capabilities of the physical senses. This kind of thinking suggests a kind of meta-science, as if science were on the cusp of metaphysical discovery, making speculative science the cutting edge of metaphysical disclosure. Of course, this kind of thing is miles from Kant, but Kant didn't understand metaphysics at all. He didn't understand that metaphysics is another order of thinking about everything.

Metaphysics makes its appearance not in the laboratory or on the white board of equations and their speculative "interpolation" where paradigms leave off, but in the simple relation between me and this cup on the table in the inquiry that brackets or suspends all superfluous and implicit assumptions that construct the knowledge relationship. The idea is that when I encounter the cup, the perceptual moment is a construct of mine, in which I already know cups and the like and this one here is, upon the familiar encounter, is already known---you know how Hegel made a huge deal out of this, justifying his "rational realism". How, after all, does one get OUT of the universal and TO the actual particular? (noting with some frustration that 'actual and 'particular' are both universal concepts themselves! No way out),or, how does one step out of language to affirm this cup which has a presence that is clearly not at all language? is how someone like Derrida would put it. Anyway, this "already" thickens, you might say, perception, defines and makes conditions for knowing something to be the case. Husserl thought that one could, through his method of suspending the vast bulk of knowledge that implicitly attends me seeing a cu--the cup as a body of coinditioned forethought, acknowledge the pure manifestation. This is existential metaphysics, it might be called.

There are those, including myself, who think that the direction of this Husserlian method takes perception to an impossible clarity of the world, which I want to call the threshold of metaphysics. Very personal, yet, not at all at odds with language and logic, as such. Its "impossibility" lies in its defiance of a shared culture of understanding. Get enough people practicing this method and talking about their experiences, and then a new language emerges. Tibetan Buddhists have a language of words only they can understand, I have read; and Heidegger talked a bit like this in his famous Der Speigal Interview referring to Buddhism.

Transcendental idealism? It is right before your eyes. Drop the term 'idealism'. Better: transcendental phenomenology.

If you haven't been able to follow the thread so far, there's not much point in continuing. — Banno

Is there nothing I can do to make you explain something? By any standard, you're just too vacant and glib. Is this what analytic philosophy's positivism has done to you? An economy of expression of such efficiency that sparsity itself is its primary tenet?

How about this piece of yours: "Metaphysics sets out the background against which the world is ordered, and is as much fiat as observation. One can avoid the circularity by recognising this."

Of course, here, with this OP, the metaphysics starts with Kant. So, and we all know how this leads on to discussions about epistemic failings of naturalistic models, like Quine's. This doesn't sound muddled to me. The issue here is principally how one can establish what is the case in the world at the level of philosophy, the most basic level, without an analytic of the structure of the relation between the known and the knower. This relationship is foundational to any ontology, and this goes directly to what BOB ROSS opened with.

Let the analysis begin, Banno. What say you regarding this matter of the lack epistemic grounding that pervades any and all that can be the case?

No. I read certain philosophy, and found it was wrong. There's a tad too much presumption in your prognosis. And very little of any substance to your replies. — Banno

Remember I asked you: "What philosopher that seems muddled are you talking about? What is the source of the muddle? This is the question is begged here."

Come on Banno, speak!!

I don't see why we should take any interest in your acts of faith. — Banno

Never liked the word faith. Endorses silliness. But if you take a few years to study and actually come to understand what this post Kantian tradition in philosophy is about, then you would realize you've been duped. It has been very clear for a long time that conversations in analytic philosophy are no more than painfully well written justifications for avoiding metaphysics. I mean, absent metaphysics, there is really nothing to say. This reduces philosophy to a trivial play of words, and does little to advance an understanding of the world at the most basic level.

MY acts if faith?? Look, someone told you long ago not to read certain philosophy, and they were wrong.

Not sure I can use this and I have, of course, heard such things expressed for much of my life. I spent my early life with Theosophists, followers of various forms of Buddhism, Hinduism, Gnosticism and mysticism. What is the discovery that one actually exists mean? — Tom Storm

This is a huge question, and I have found reading mysticism and the Eastern descriptions of deeper insight simply assumes what has to be shown. The Cloud of Unknowing and Meister Eckhart sermons, say, are extraordinary statements, but how does one get there, to the essential thought and experience, from here, this everyday world, given that the latter constitutes a level of engagement history has really never seen before. This didn't exist when Eckhart was around, this inflated cultural construction that is entirely open to expansion, reducing our world to stereo instructions, if you will.

Only way competent inquiry can begin, is with the infamous phenomenological reduction of Husserl. Husserl speaks through European tradition, so we can understand as he does and follow along, and not in some exotic distant language of another time and mentality. Husserl is meticulous (boringly so) but he takes this OP line of thinking to its only possible conclusion: when we start asking those Kantian questions about the relation between a thought, its consciousness, and the world, the original relation is between transcendence and and me, not to put to fine a point on it. Transcendence here is really just a simple concept: I am me and there is a cup, so the cup transcends me because it is over there and not me at all. So how is it that one spans the gap between the two? Notice that if this cannot be dome, the cup is simply, and rightly called, transcendent.

Kant never went this way. He held transcendence to be perceptually beyond access. Husserl puts it there, right in your face. This is where the entire body of mystical writing humans have ever produced begins, in this simple encounter with transcendence: this cup is noumenal; phenomena are noumenal, if you want to talk like that. Husserl was no mystic, but this is because he was like Kant, strong intellectual gifts, but weak on intuition.

I don't disagree, but how far to take it? I think of science as a tool for acquiring tentative models that are useful in certain contexts. Is the gap between science and reality or the gap between anything and reality worth filling with speculations? For me it isn't. An issue for me is that reality itself is a gap. It's an abstract idea, we fill with our values and anticipations. — Tom Storm

Take Kastrup's Is Reality Made of Consciuosness (someone mentioned earlier and I looked him up): Certainly not that he is wrong. Not at all! But this is more at scienctific speculation than it is philosophy. But, I won't quibble about words. Talk about particles and particle interactions just beg the question: how does anything out there get in here, a brain? He is right to dismiss ontological divisions and tossing out mind body pseudo problems, but he stays in the scienctific speculative mode. The problem of consciousness is always personal, in the extreme personal, for there is no actual collective consciousness, and therefore the concrete evidence lies not public affirmation that science makes, but in the actuality of consciousness itself. The premises one seeks for one' argument about the nature of consciousness and the world lie in the objectivity of scientific inquiry (there is no other than the scientific method. Tying my shoes and affirming the Eiffel Tower is in Paris are applications of the scientific method) into consicousness itself. That is, in "me".

Here? Following on from the OP. — Banno

The OP refers to Kant and post Kantian thinking. The muddle is what is in question. It is a difficult question for anyone who takes the categories of empirical science as a sound board for philosophical inquiry, but what you call muddle is simply the nature of our world, which is foundational indeterminacy. If you don't deal with Kant and his legacy and try to imagine two centuries of continental philosophy (I continuing on into the present through Levinas, Derrida and post Heideggerians) as something you can just "skip" and still remain in in good faith, then you are simply deluded.

No offense intended in saying this, but to speak of a cupboard, as you do above, like Moore speaks of his hands, then you really haven't even begun.

I'll admit the possibility and then choose silence. Many a philosopher will wax prosaically at length on this topic. That seems muddled. — Banno

Consider what it is that is silenced: it is the ordinary sense of the world that usually and immediately makes the claim on the moment. This is suspended. Where those who takes this kind of thing seriously differ is what this "nothing" reveals, but to even grasp at all what is at issue, one has have the prior exposure to the philosophy that opens inquiry into this.
What philosopher that seems muddled are you talking about? What is the source of the muddle? This is the question is begged here.

I guess I also find myself wondering, if accurate. so what? Does it make any difference to how one lives? How is this way of thinking of use? — Tom Storm

I'm of no use here, Bob, apologies. There wasn't an argument. It was simply the fact that for practical purposes idealism makes no difference to my day-to-day experience. So it just faded as I got on with life. Additionally, I'm not all that concerned if the nature of reality remains forever elusive to humans. Since we conduct ourselves in a realm which appears to be material (whatever it may be in itself), that's all I need to make effective use of the life I have. — Tom Storm

Looking through comments, you caught my eye. Just a comment or so. I would guess (guess, not know) that you haven't come to see the course of thought that lies through and beyond Kant. Something Kant did not see, for he was a rationalist, rigidly so, and therefore was unable to draw certain conclusions about where inquiry ultimately goes in philosophy. But when he affirmed that one had to go through epistemology to get to ontology, that is, that claims about what is real are entirely contingent on what one can know, he made it clear that it was impossible to disentangle the former from the latter. But he was such a dyed in the wool rationalist, he couldn't make the Kierkegaardian "qualitative move", something that rings throughout subsequent phenomenology: This cup on the table is bound to my mental grasp of it being a cup, and this latter defines the extent the understanding can know the cup. But what about the irrational feels and fleshy tonalities (Michel Henry talks like this) and the bare presence of this thing?

There is, of course, a lot written about this, but the point would go like this: when we turn our attention to this conscious grasp of its object, and we turn explicitly away from its contextual and logical placings, which is to say we shut up about it and thereby allow (Heidegger borrows the term 'gelassenheit' to talk about this yield to the world as opposed to applying familiar categories) the world to speak, so to speak, the presence of the object steps forth. This is an existential move, not a logical inference, away from all that makes the cup the usual familiar cup.

Why bother to do this? Because the reality of the world rests with familiarity, not with some sublime connectivity between science and reality. When Kastrup talks about the brain, he simply assumes what Kantians, or neoKantians, take up in analysis. But Kant gets lost in his own tendency reduce things to form and structure, and it never occurred to him that he was making assumptions in his "objective" thesis that were themselves grounded on a profound and pervasive indeterminacy. Or, he did know this, but could make the move to affirm it, because he didn't see what Kierkegaard saw: that a concept, on the one hand, and this bare givenness of things on the other, had absolutely no continuity between the two. They are qualitatively radically "other" than one another, and this is made profoundly clear in extreme phenomenal affairs, like having your tooth pulled without anesthetic: clearly on is not witnessing reason at work; nor is a simple phenomenological grasp of the color yellow reason at work IN the yellow color.

Didn't realize I had written so much. At any rate, the value of this line of thinking lies not in some propositional statement. It is existential, like an awakening, because one realizes for the first time in this discovery that one actually exists. This is the existential foundation of religion. Of course, this take practice and study, but this is the brass ring of philosophy.

It's strange to think of the phenomena/noumena distiction in relation to one's own body parts. Is there a nose-in-itself vs the phenomena of it? — Gregory

Well, this doesn't make the essential move, which begins with the logical structure of the statement about a nose bleed. Kant is doing an analysis of knowledge relationships, so there you are observing such a thing, the nose bleeding, and within an everyday sense of things, it is routinely familiar, something everyone knows about, like grass growing. But what is the knowledge relationship? This is what Kant wants to analyze. And epistemological determinations dictate ontological ones.

This is really a pretty familiar method. After all, your nose bleed has a number of analytical perspectives. What would a particle physicist say it "is"? Or an immunobiologist? Kant is a transcendental idealist. Look at the matter from his perspective. Alas, you have to read the Critiuqe of Pure Reason to do this.

What contentions do you have? — Bob Ross

You are on the right path, by my thinking. But you need to take the next step, and this is a very big step: Kant found noumena in some impossible beyond, but this entails that all that stands before us in intelligible structured existence stands apart from noumena, which makes talk about noumena impossible, rendering the concept worse than a mere necessary postulation: it is no less than nonsense of the order of, say, denying the principle of contradiction. Apodictically impossible, as Kant would put it.

Not only does this make any proposition about noumena nonsense (like Wittgenstein said about "the world" or value), it draws an impossible line, that between noumena and phenomena, as if all that is there in plain sight is of another ontological order entirely. If noumena is supposed to be true, unconditioned and eternal Real, then how is it possible to draw such a line which excludes my occurrent apprehension of this lamp on my desk? Excluded how? To draw such a line, as Wittgenstein reminds us, one has to know both sides to make sense, so how does one make sense of delimiting noumena?

What the Kantian concept fails to see is that noumena is all pervasive. This obviates the nonsense about ontological divisions: there are none. (One odd conclusion of this is that analytic philosophers lean toward the Kantian side of the issue, maintaining that talk about metaphysics is nonsense, while seriously opposing any talk about Kant.) One has to except that this lamp is noumenal, that phenomenal events are noumenal events. The trouble lies not in ontology but epistemology: there is something about this lamp that I am not seeing yet is there always already IN the seeing.

This is the kind of sh** that drives analytic philosophers crazy. Keep in mind that Russell called Wittgenstein a mystic because of his "threshold" claims and there is an entire philosophical tradition called phenomenology that travels right up this alley.

Well this is an entirely different topic (that I have addressed elsewhere—or could explain by msg) but I’m not saying he sees through language like a wall that he makes transparent, but that he examines (looks AT) the kinds of the things we say (the possible expressions) about a certain thing (at a time and place) because those are evidence of our criteria for that thing. It is a philosophical method. And taking Wittgenstein to be dividing what we can and cannot talk about is a remnant of the Tractatus; part of the point of the PI is to show how we can actually have rational, quasi-logical discussions about all kinds of things, and, thus, that the Investigations is actually an examination of why we imagine we can’t. — Antony Nickles

Yeah, I will take a close look at Investigations soon. After I finish with Michel Henry and others. But two things: As to it being an entirely different topic, it certainly is thematically different, but since the issue is of the "when" we exist, is it not that this "when" lies outside discussions of epistemology. All philosophy has to pass through this, for at the basic level, all that is, is known to be, and so knowing is foundational, presupposed. The when of one's existence goes to time and time is the essential structure that receives and produces the world, then talk about a self and anything else is about time. That is, before I can talk about anything at the basic level, I have to talk about the conditions that structure and constitute that thing. This goes directly to "subjective time."

At the outset, one is greeted with a paradox: normal talk about time presupposes something that is not at all normal and familiar, which is the temporality of thought and experience itself. This is us. The paradox is Wittgensteinian: To speak at all presupposes the assumptions about the validity about speaking, but these presuppositions cannot be addressed in the speaking. This is the worst kind of question begging. But while a perspective outside of our own subjectivity is impossible (like trying to talk about the basis for the principle of non-contradiction), one has to wonder if there is anything that is beyond indeterminacy.

The second thing is this, speaking of a method as you did: In inquiring about the "when" of the self, is there anything at all that survives the Cartesian doubt that rules philosophical inquiry (per the above)? Is there not a method that is at once radically negative (or, apophatically negative, I might put it), yet radically positive as well? Something that both tears down all assumptions, yet discovers what lies beneath that cannot be torn down. This is Husserl's reduction, which is a method. As he says in "The Idea of Phenomenology":

Phenomenology: this term designates a science, a complex of scientific -
disciplines; but it also designates at the same time and above all a method and
an attitude of thought: the specifically philosophical attitude of thought, the
specifically philosophical method.

The difference here is this: Husserl thought he had discovered the solution to epistemological and ontological transcendence, which was achieved through his method, the phenomenological reduction. Witt would have thought this insane.

But Husserl was qualifiedly right.

Yes, a moral agreement works differently than walking, or measuring an atom, or having a self. But they are all going to be “cast in language” as the means by which we communicate about them (or, meant how else?). We think we understand what “Language” is (as some general thing), but this is just to take the possibility of, and our part in, failing to communicate or reach agreement, and to project it—out of fear—onto something other than us (to put our failings onto “language”). Another way of doing this is to say we (or language) cannot communicate “me” (my “constant” self), “my thought”, what “I mean”. This mischaracterization is not a misunderstanding of “language” (to be corrected) but blindly homogenizing the world in requiring something certain (even in creating an “uncertain” fall-guy). We ignore that things are more complicated so we don’t need to be responsible for what we say, or do, or judge. — Antony Nickles

There is something to this, if I take your meaning. Language produces generalities that fail to speak the complexities of one's subjective world. One can thus toss out casually words and their meanings into an arena of standardized thinking, and this pretty much belies the rich interior of one's true actual world. Worst yet is that this inner world gets lost entirely, yielding to the general (Heidegger's das man), and this is a crisis of identity. One becomes this body of generalities.

Phenomenologists have the cure: Kierkegaard's qualitative leap, Husserl's epoche, Heidegger's turn to
authenticity. Of course, the Buddhists, the quintiessential phenomenologists, have their liberation and enlightenment. But it is not, as you say, things being "more complicated," presumably referriing to the complexity of one's inner world. Rather, here the brass ring is a simplicity. Sure, their philosophy is dense and alien to common sense, but the "turn" itself is simple. Fascinating the way this works if one has a mind to pursue it. Buddhists take the whole idea to its impossible end, which is an altogether termination of this world.

This “anticipated response” comes, as I think we also agree, from being raised into a culture, a way of living together, which comes before us, prior, “already” (though perhaps not “known” as in: not always aware of, explicated, examined; thus philosophy). But there are times where a practice moves into a new context, when there is an act which we do not anticipate. I find you basically the same place in saying “Ontology begins when we insert the question about this world and its being.” (Though I’ll just qualify, if needed, that this is not to question the “whole” world, in seeing the situational nature of our various customs, etc.). And, like any moral situation, that we have the means of addressing it, understanding it (because it is in contrast to the already-existing expectations (standing possibilities you say). This is the moment of the self, its being in relation to our history, our culture, against our conformity to it. — Antony Nickles

The reason I take the matter to the level of philosophy by referring to the world, and not just some particular context of categorical belonging is because the question you ask is about the self-in-time, the "when" of the self, and talk like this refers the totality of what the self is and not any of its specific, as Heidegger put it, potentialities of possibilities. The self is taken as an aggregate of these, not too far afield from Kant's transcendental unity of apperception, though here, I am not concerned with his grand reduction to structure of the rational mind. Kant's concept of the self is an abstraction from what Michel Henry (my newest infatuation) calls life, for which he has a strong phenomenological designation. One cannot "fit" the self into a box, to speak loosely, and the same goes for time, the "when" of the issue at hand. Objective time is everyday time, all to familiar. Subjective time's examination begins when we understand that all of our objective possibilities of thinking about time (the whens, how longs, what time it is, being late or early, and on and on) issue from a temporally structured self: thought and the experience it belongs to itself IS time. Kant said this, of course, but again, his "when" of the self is an examination of the mere vessel or form of our existence (per the Transcendental Aesthetic). Phenomenology conceives the entirety of the self.

I agree with what you say regarding the self historical grounding in morality. But I want to take ethics to its true grounding which lies in the metaethical issue: what is the ethical/aesthetic good and the bad? This is where the self finds its essence, for such a question goes, as do all things, to the question of the pure givenness of the world, the value-qualia, if you will: OUCH! What IS that?

This does wander away from the "when" of the self, granted. But then the when is always a when of the self. Any analysis of value-qualia, as I call it, is an attempt discover the nature of the when-self, itself. Our existence is time. AS I experience I anticipate, I summon the past, both at once to write these words. My affective being, the caring, interest, doubt, dread, and so on, built into this, making the normativity of ethics a wholly temporal affair.

I am not arguing for certainty, what I am saying is that humanity craves it. We are afraid of the fact that knowledge doesn’t get us all the way there, that we must insert ourselves behind our words, to stand by them; “accepting the possibilities” especially when extending those possibilities, living in a way that gives them new life, shows what it is to be, say, “just”, by being an example of it. That fear of our fallible human condition creates the desire for something that can take us out of the equation, e.g., if there are rules, then I can just follow the rules and I will be right; as if conformity absolves me. So we impose upon everything the same desired outcome which generalizes over each things’ possibilities. So the self is imagined as a constant, given, maybe unknowable thing, so I can have it (and I can keep it from you) without having to answer for my expressions and actions. I take this as Kierkegaard “sin” that is possible in this moment. Or that in not answering, we are still held to account, but only in that it doesn’t matter if it is us, because the usual expectations and answer, etc. apply, so I am unnecessary, or, that I do not exist, which I take it you mean by “failure to confirm to be applied to one's own existence qua existence.”

I should also say that reflection at these moments is the purpose of philosophy. That to have “consciousness of one’s freedom” is not a given, but an effort, a change in not knowledge, but attitude (perspective), such as contained in a paradox like: we are born free but are everywhere in chains. — Antony Nickles

Well said, I say to much of this. Kierkegaard's sin, there are two parts to this, historical (the sin of the race, as K calls it), and subjective sin, an existential and highly personal affair. Best book by far is his Concept of Anxiety. Couldn't possibly do it justice here. Suffice to say that metaphysics is an actuality

As to craving certainty, Peirce's Fixation of Belief fits your account, I think. Belief is the stability and freedom from doubt, and we take the pragmatic route toward fixity. But fleeing doubt is a fleeing of the discomfort of doubt, and this begs a question of value-in-the-world, or value-qualia. one analytic step further in leads to the question of value qua value, the thousand natural shocks the flesh is heir to, as Hamlet said. This presence of value-in-being is by far the most important question one can even conceive, I say.

Of course, many existentialists will take this as a basic description of our religious condition, where doubt is alienation from God. A good point in this, though: What kind of doubt? Ordinary doubt in the bus arriving on time or doubt in someone's behavior in some circumstance is clearly contextual and doubt is no real mystery, in itself, because one can explain it, cast it terms that make sense. But doubt about the self is different because here we stand on the threshold of metaphysics: what is a self? Why am I (are we) born to suffer and die? And love and hope and dream? To me, this threshold is deeply profound, for it is not just an abstract issue, a premise in an argument (though it is certainly this). It is the palpable presence of the world, the "life" we are thrown into, this living vulnerable flesh "rubbing abrasively" against the brute physicality of it all. Here I take your point (as I see it) about language to heart: language and culture (the two are really the same, for one cannot speak without being IN a context of beliefs, values, assumptions, etc.) distract, ameliorate, reduce to a palatable form, this world existence. We live lives of cultural fixities with all of those concerns we deal with every day. Life is reduced to a manageable triviality. This is K's complaint, and the essential complaint of phenomenology as a social commentary.

Quite right about the effort to be free. But again, Rousseau's thinking was political, playing against Hobbes, as I recall. Inquiry will take this to the wire and I am reminded of Foucault's thoughts about Bentham's panoptical prison concept in which there is no need for guards for we possess the censure for bad or inordinate behavior. We are our own prisoners, so to speak. The question is, what is there to be free for?

But philosophy does not always “talk about language”. To ask what the good is is not to talk about the word “good”. In the Investigations, Wittgenstein just looks through language (specifically, what we say when...) to see the world, because our interests and judgments of the world are reflected by what we say in a situation (during an activity). — Antony Nickles

The good is a special question. But what it IS is going to be cast in language. I don't see Wittgenstein looking through language. I do see him having the insight that propositional knowledge cannot "speak" what the good is, because this is a question that goes to value, and value is the intuitive irreducible presence. One cannot, for example, say what a pain as a pure phenomenon is. One can talk about it is many contexts, but pain qua pain is just the pure givenness of the world. But unlike qualia, it has an ethical/aesthetic dimension (Witt says these are really the same thing, for ethics and aesthetics are essentially about value).

Philosophy is about inquiring into anything at the most basic level. The Tractatus, Witt said, is mostly about what is not said. The limits of meaningful talk show us the threshold of our existence. In Culture and Values he says divinity is the good. A bold statement for someone who drew such a line between what can and cannot be said in the Tractatus.

I say philosophy always ends in a discussion about language, I mean anything that can be said is question begging. This is because saying something meaningful always gets its meaning from the "difference" and the "deference" of words, sentences, etc. Obviously we humans do more than explain knowledge claims. It is the everydayness of living that goes on people are not really interested in underlying existential assumptions at all. This is the job of philosophy and, for most, religion. Philosophy understands (say the phenomenologists) that our everyday thoughts and engagements are, in the Cartesian/Husserlian vein, wreathed in questions, if you will. This is where epistemology discovers its own foundational failure.

Analytic philosophers don't like to consider this, but this is because they despise any hint of Kant and indeterminacy. This, in my view, trivializes philosophy, and the world, this positivist insistence on clarity over meaning and content.

The world is foundationally indeterminate. This is hermeneutics.

By “activity” I just mean what Witt terms “concepts” which is just to say, regular human stuff: pointing, apologizing, being just, measuring, excusing, following a rule, extending a series, etc., some of which he uses as his examples in the Investigations. To say “we already know it” is the same as the fact that we get indoctrinated (or, as you say, “enculturated education”) into a history of criteria and judgments for things which we operate on without reflection; I take this as the social contract and conformity. That Kierkegaard says we inherit the “sin” of it I take to record that we are compromised by conformity, comprised of nothing but our culture (the means of production) if I do not claim what is mine from it, against it. — Antony Nickles

Kierkegaard analyzes Christian original sin down to hereditary sin. He uses the Bible story to do this "psychological" analysis. The Concept of Anxiety is a fascinating read! One finds Heidegger everywhere in this book. Of courwe, K is a Christian, so alienation is not going to be the nothing that beckons from metaphysics. It is going to be alienation from God. Human culture is alienation from God when one is mesmerized by day to day affairs and refuses to face the "nothing" of its foundation.

Familiarity for human dasein (Heidegger's term) is a language phenomenon. It's a big issue for Heidegger, for at its center is time, and knowledge is a forward looking affair. Indoctrinated? This term has connotations of a particular kind to learning, but learning, but more generally one could call it conditioning into a collective understanding of the world. One IS dasein, and the historical process of language's evolution and the personal acculturation are conditions that constitute being human.

Etc., etc. Long, long story.

Well, we would need to unpack this, but to be as poetic: the self IS only WHEN (in relation to conformity). — Antony Nickles

One cannot unpack Heidegger like this. His phenomenology of time is too complex. There is, though, this quite simple pragmatist account. What IS nitro glycerin? The most basic analysis is contained in a conditional proposition: If you take some quantity X of nitro travels at some velocity Y and impacts some surface, Then, the result will be an explosion of some magnitude Z. Crudely put, but it makes the point. A think IS the anticipated response in a certain environment (H calls these environments of Equipment). Everything is like this, for an encounter with a thing is always already known, anticipated, prior to the encounter, like taking a step and knowing the sidewalk will not sink but support the step.

Mind/body issues vanish, and the pragmatic time analysis is basic. This little forward looking analysis is the basis for H's hermeneutics. Massively interesting.

A handstand can be explained (how to do one, etc.), but what is essential to a handstand (what it IS) is reflected by the criteria we use to judge, for instance, what makes one better. or a handstand different from a… to switch examples, say, walking different than running; what goes toward counting with this activity, mattering to us. Thus the self IS only in its alignment or aversion to these terms of judgment, when those things are at issue for me. — Antony Nickles

That sounds like Heidegger.

All that is being said here is these "terms of judgment" belong to language, as in describing the utility of one way over another. There is the acting on judgment, the practical end of things, and this would be looking to outcomes, making knowledge forward looking. Thought itself is forward looking and our existence is a forward looking stream of events. Observing my cat is to anticipate the "potentiality of possibilities" that come to mind when I see my cat and assume it will just sit there and sleep. Obviously, my cat does the same with me, anticipating food in the morning, etc. But my cat is not dasein. Human existence is a language construct through which there is an understanding of the world, Dasein does not HAVE this. It IS this. Heidegger dismisses the duality of consciousness/object. Objects in the world ARE the language embodiment! They are something else, too, but this "something else," until this is taken up in dasein's language/culture "inheritance" (Kierkegaard's original idea on this) is nothing to us but the potentiality of possibilities.

We are far afield here, but knowledge is “inherently anticipatory” only if we require that certainty (only accept the outcome of predictability, predetermination), as if equating “knowing” gymnastics is like the knowledge of facts. Thus, in the light of this requirement for certainty, the self must be an ever-present, unique "fact". — Antony Nickles

In the doing, there is not the thinking of what the doing is. This is clear. But this, call it oblivious doing belong to what H calls preontology, our everydayness, and we live in this just as typing these words requires has nothing to do with thinking about where the fingers go or if the keyboard is in working order. This world of just carrying on is us in the ready-to-hand mode of our existence. Ontology begins when we insert the question about this world and its being. In this "movement" we see our freedom to make an unmade future (as I see it, the question, the piety of language, opens possibilities that stand before our freedom. This is existential anxiety. K said this a hundred years before H.

So knowledge is always anticipatory. This lies not in accepting the out come, but in accepting the possibilities, which seems the opposite of certainty. One creates one's existence in this consciousness of one's freedom.

said knowledge is not our only connection to the world. Thus the importance of an occasion regarding the self. Our understanding of what is essential about a promise are the ordinary (unreflected on) criteria for identity of a promise, the appropriateness, the completion, etc. It is when these criteria (our shared conformity) come into question (in a situation, not stripped of everything to be “basic”, contextless), that we are not making a “knowledge” claim, but a claim of what is ours, what we are prepared to live by as mattering to us in a situation where knowledge has failed, or does not rule, as in a moral moment. But there is a time and place when we are lost, as you say, “where everything is epistemically indeterminate”, which is the moment for the self to assert itself, claim itself.

I appreciate the further connections and the effort, thank you. — Antony Nickles

Apologies for all the writing. I have the time lately.

The knowledge claim would go to the assumptions that are already in place when one enters into a situation. They may fail, as when my car doesn't start, or they may, as is usually the case, be part of the continuing confirmation that cars start in the usual way. The car not starting imposes the question, why? This is when freedom and its indeterminacy steps in. Take that question conceive of the failure to confirm to be applied to one's own existence qua existence. Now this is metaphysics: to stand before the nothing where one's potentialities to respond a mute, and existence just stares back.

For K especially, this is an existential crisis, and sin in born.

But we aren’t investigating language, and I don’t know how an activities’ possibilities are “contingent” or “propositional” (somehow not how the world works?). The ordinary criteria come from what has mattered to us about stuff over the vast history of our lives; the “possibilities” are what count in the judgment of a thing. We define ourselves in relation to them (against, re-invigorating, etc.), so this is not a social theory but how the self is differentiated from our shared lives. — Antony Nickles

It would be argued that whatever you talk about, you are always talking about language when inquiry moves to basic assumptions, which is philosophy. Wittgenstein's Tractatus' states of affairs are facts and facts are propositions in the logical grid of sensible talk. An activity? What is this? This is a predelineated event, that is, I already know what it is before I do it. We live in this always already knowing.

The point is that language is not simply in our everyday lives. It IS this. Heidegger holds that there really is no mind/body separation at all. For dasein, to see a thing is to already know it, and the knowledge is part and parcel of the thing. A human being IS a WHEN (interesting to note that the same holds for dogs and cats. I think animals have a proto-linguistic grasp of their affairs, as memory informs the present matter and establishes a sense of familiarity and habit of responding. This temporal construct is their existence), not IN a when (as might be said of objective time, when we say, you're late! or, what time is it? We speak here, rather, of Subjective time, what Augustine started in his Confessions, through Kant, and Kierkegaard, and others).

Doing a hand stand is not explaining a hand stand, this understood. But what a hand stand IS, is in the explanation. One could say that language is reducible to pragmatics, as Rorty does. But this gets into a technical discussion. E.g., if for S to know P is inherently anticipatory, and knowledge is a time event, then my knowing where to put my hands on the uneven bars is essentially like my knowing oaks trees are deciduous: no more than the forward looking engagement that anticipates an outcome.

This that you say about our "vast history" sounds very Heideggerian. All that we think is spontaneous and present issues from an enculturated education. (what Kierkegaard called inherited sin!).

Well, kudos for reading Levinas. There is a thread of similarity here. When we are just conforming, we are “living naively” (as Plato will say, unreflectively), and just “carrying out the acts proper” and “allowing ourselves to be led”. Wittgenstein is investing the “motives that operate therein” as the fear of skepticism and thus the desire for certainty, which we turn from to realize our “real need” (PI, #108)—as we do in differentiating the self. He will similarly “set all these [he will say “metaphysical criteria”] “out of action”, not to “take no part in them”, but to understand why we desired their certainty. — Antony Nickles

Not Levinas, Husserl, from his Ideas I. To understand "why we desired their certainty" is interesting. I'll have to read this in whole (having just looked here and there). I think Peirce had a good take on this in his Fixation of Belief: doubt steps in, creates unrest, then the movement away from unrest toward certainly or fixity anticipates solace. Something like that as I recall. Of course, we will be reminded that while this explanation (a good one!) intends to reduce one thing, belief, to another, the pragmatic move toward stability, we begin all of this in language. We cast our concepts at first IN language. 'Pragmatism,' say, is a particle of language prior to being about anything at all. It is not that there is nothing other than language, but our understanding is contingent on what language is and can do. Hence, hermeneutical openness.

In relation to the self, things don’t “epistemically transcend my reach”. Knowledge does not do everything; it is not our only connection to the world. We “access” apologies, and justice, and chairs each differently, through the ordinary criteria for each: for their identification, how our judgment of your acts with them work, how porous the boundaries, how change happens or not, etc. So there is nothing which connect these things; and, even if there were—say, all: objects—it would be the criteria for objects, not “me”. “I” am not “foundational”, and my self-awareness and internal dialogue are unremarkable in this regard. This picture of “me” and this conception of a “transcendent natural world” is based on the desire to have something fixed, pure, math-like, dependable, predetermined, universal, complete, generalized, etc. If our ordinary criteria are Emerson’s “conformity, the “social contract”, then I don’t only “know” those or not, I claim them, or defy them, live them, or don’t stand up for them, etc. — Antony Nickles

You would be hard pressed to argue that knowledge is not our connection with the world. I am not saying language is all there is to human existence. I am saying that when we try to understand anything at the most basic level of assumptions, THEN we face language, and the question of what language is is antecedent to anything else. Everything is a knowledge claim when we try to say what a thing is. I ask you, what IS justice? or, what IS a promise? Then we are deep in language and logic.

To claim this is not the case runs squarely into a performative contradiction, for the denial itself is a language/logic phenomenon.

There really is no way around this. The good news is that language is entirely open. God could literally appear before me and impart an intuitive wisdom of all things, and language would not be somehow undone, for the only requirement here would be a shared intuition with my interlocutor. We could talk all day about it, notwithstanding Derrida. Hermeneuticists don't deny this possibility, for they are assuming such a thing would constitute mystical knowledge and this is just bad metaphysics, that is, bad metaphysics UNTIL it actually happened. And this supposition is not logically impossible for this to happen---there are no contradictions necessarily assumed if God did this. Just something entirely other than what is familiar.

The bad news is that unless divine wisdom were intuitively deposited in one's mind, thereby establishing a true absolute foundation for understanding the world, we are bound to a world where everything is epistemically indeterminate.

Until ethics and aesthetics are considered. Again where Wittgenstein feared to go. He was right about this, and Heidegger agreed.

And this I take as what Emerson is referring to as conformity, and Wittgenstein labels “grammar”(the ordinary criteria for judgment), and what Rousseau is calling the social contract, the general will. — Antony Nickles

I have a very soft spot in my thoughts for Emerson. Philosophically I think lacks discipline, as with my favorite, "Nature"; he sort of toys with Platonism and casually constructs a metaphysics. But it's not that he is wrong, for this isn't the point. He invites us to think and experience like mystics, and imagines how this would go. It is his walk on a bare common and being glad to the brink of fear, and standing before nature like a transparent eyeball! This is not philosophy, but is more aligned with pseudo Dionysius the Areopagite or Meister Eckhart, but with passion.
But the Witt, Rousseau, is not quite the thinking. In Discourse on Thinking, Heidegger gives us a picture of meditative thought, something threatened by the mentality of modern technology, which tends to reduce meaningful encounters with the world to a "standing reserve" of utility (Hartmut Rosa's Social Acceleration was inspired by H. Things today are far worse than he ever imagined). His gelassenheit is something like this:

That which shows itself and at the same
time withdraws is the essential trait of what we call the
mystery. I call the comportment which enables us to keep
open to the meaning hidden in technology, openness to the
mystery.
Releasement toward things and openness to the mystery
belong together. They grant us the possibility of dwelling
in the world in a totally different way. They promise us a
new ground and foundation upon which we can stand and
endure in the world of technology without being imperiled
by it.

(Memorial Address from Discourse on Thinking)

For Heidegger the general will is "the they," which is what we first encounter in the process of enculturation. It is here that we "forget" our essential self. Meditative thought is a reduction of this to a phenomenological ontology.

I think Heidegger gets some things astoundingly right (because Kierkegaard got them right).

And of course, as there are similarities, there are divergences (though more interesting ones because sensible in being closer). In its openness to “interpretation”, I think it is important to note there is a “when” this happens (as not all the time), and forms, structures, “grammar”, rules, morals, etc. (what I take you to mean by “IN the context of its own contingency), in or from which a divergence is only even possible. However, each thing with its own structure, measures, considerations. Thus “the giveness of the world that is not language and culture” only enters into some situations, and those do not involve my interpretation (as science’s results are the same for anyone following its method), nor always my experience (neither the opportunity for it nor because I am always “experiencing”).

And so, the criteria and circumstances of the life of the self (which may not, or not continually, happen), work and are measured in totally different ways (as pain is important to us in my response to you being in pain). This is not in my interpretation of culture (though that is a thing), but in my relation to it: pushing against it, bringing it alive again (as it can be dead also). Thus the importance of this instant (go now! Emerson seems to say), and the “power” Rousseau claims it takes, to claim my self (my future responsiveness) as authority, for example, over what we are to call “right”, how to measure the (common) “good” (as Plato could not with knowledge, as Kant could not with logic). — Antony Nickles

The idea of hermeneutics is a bit more radical than this. To know is to interpret. This is really the basis for all the fuss about post modern thinking, for (see Derrida's Structure, Sign and Play. For Derrida's link to Heidegger I found Caputo's Radical Hermeneutics very useful) there is nothing at all that can be said that is free of a context, for contexts give meaning its center, its meaning assignments. Outside of language's contexts, nothing at all is to be said. I suppose for Wittgenstein, it would be outside of a language game, we pass over all things in silence (as with the Tractatus). It is right to say that basic to something being said at all is structure, grammar, etc. But then, this idea is as well contextualized to the context of talk about what grammar and structure "are". Nothing escapes deconstruction, this endless deferring to other contexts of discussion to explain what one is talking about. There is, in Rorty's terms, no final vocabulary, like something engraved on stone tablets by God. The word rests, every iota of it, on metaphysics, and metaphysics is nonsense, says Rorty. Not just a bad idea, but just GHHJK#^&*&*. Saying as I did, that everything rests on metaphysics, is just nonsense. For him, only propositions can be true of false, and there are no propositions "out there".

I agree and don't agree. Rorty just couldn't see knowledge without language. I think language is the setting for knowledge without language. What is non propositional truth? An excellent question. Hard to say...heh heh. This is why I read Michel Henry.

I take it Wittgenstein is the one thought to be only describing “a senseless abstract idea”, which is the common misunderstanding that he is concerned with language, and not that he is looking at it—specifically: what we say, when… —as his method of understanding the world (and our interests in it, what is essential about it).

Nevertheless, the “radicalness” I claim as our self’s stance to the conformity to our culture (what Wittgenstein will see as the criteria for judging each different thing, the current possibilities of its “senses”, as in: versions). Some take Wittgenstein as defending common sense, or solving skepticism, but this misses his discussion of the extension of our concepts, the seeing aspects of a thing (as it were) with a force against the norm. Though not a “metaphysical” me, but constitutive of me (a new constitution); not a “presence” of the world, as if a quality, like an imposed “reality”. Derrida and Marx thought tearing down the ordinary would was necessary to reveal a new relation to the world. Nietszche says that our morals needed to be made alive again, or reconsidered, by a new human, a me in a new defining position to the world. — Antony Nickles

Philosophers talk a lot about this. The argument, as I understand it, comes down to the very simple insight that we cannot speak the world, for meaningful language requires requires predication. To say "I am" as a reference to stand alone being is nonsense because in order for a proposition to make sense one has to be able to imagine it not to be the case. Talk about being as such, not being red or being a teacher, but just stand alone am-ness, if you will, doesn't have a meaningful contradiction possible, for there is nothing that one can imagine that "is not". If nothing is being predicated of X, then saying X is makes "is" an entirely vacant concept. I think this is the idea.

Witt called "the world" mystical. And he flat out refused to talk about ethics and aesthetics in basic terms, because all of this leads one the intuitive givenness of things that is not reducible to any possible explanatory context. I think of it in terms of Derrida's difference/differance that constitutes the "trace" that is this kind of emerging quality of related meanings. Calling something a fence post doesn't really have the power to make a true singular reference. Such singularity is impossible, and this makes a mess out of science and knowledge claims in general.

I’ve read “What is called Thinking?”, in which I take Heidegger as examining that thinking is not the violent imposing of a set requirement (the “egoistic” idea of trapping the world in a word), but being drawn into, passively submitting (as you say, “yielding”) to, what he says “calls” to us about a thing, which I take as the difference Wittgenstein makes between explanation and description, or looking at our ordinary criteria as evidence of what is attractive about a thing, it’s “possibilities”, as what is essential. And when you say this is not a “finished matter” I take it as to the future of a thing, but also to the ability of our extending our practices, our judgment, etc., and that this is the true realm of the human, that we take up and thus which defines us. — Antony Nickles

Right, Heidegger was the opposite of the kind of rigor of assumptions found in technology and science (though he makes pains to say he certainly not anti science). This openness is the nothing (derivative of Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety. Reading this latter one sees exactly where Heidegger got some of his major ideas) of pulling away from beingS. Fascinating, at least to me.

Haven't read What Is Called Thinking, though I do have it, because I have everything he wrote on pdf. Wittgenstein's explanation and description sounds familiar. I can say description is the way the world "shows" itself, logic and value are shown (given) and have no explanatory possibilities at the basic level. One cannot talk about logic since it is logic doing the talking. What is required is a third pov to explain logic, but then, this would also require yet another pov to explain it, ad infinitum. Nor can one explain suffering. It is simply there, and saying "simply there" makes good sense in many contexts; but when I say it to talk about pure givennes of pain, I am talking nonsense, says Witt. The Tractatus is nonsense itself for bringing it up, so he says.

Rorty is a big fan of this kind of thing. Everything is contingent, period, he says: truth is made, not discovered. He was very fond of Wittgenstein and Heidegger. Derrida, too.

It has always seemed to me that when talking about the self, it is important to get clear about the difference between the subject, or that which is experiencing, and the content of experience. A story one tells oneself about oneself, or any conception or representation of oneself one might have, is not the subject, but rather content. It is a structure of thought, not the one that experiences having a thought.

What Descartes was saying, in my understanding, was that whatever I am thinking can be false, but I myself cannot be nonexistent and yet believe that I am. Whatever story I tell myself or that appears in my mind can be erroneous. Its claims might not correspond to reality. But I myself, the thinker itself, that which experiences having such possibly erroneous thoughts, cannot be an illusion. Everything I see might be a hallucination, including my own reflection in the mirror, but I myself, the subject, cannot be an illusion. Even if I am deceived, I am having an experience, and so I am. I might be wrong about my form, but I as long as there is experience, however false, there is an experiencer. It is inconceivable that a nonexistent entity might be fooled in any way whatsoever, and that includes being misled to believe that it exists.

A stage magician can lead an audience to believe all sorts of false things. But one thing the magician cannot do is convince a nonexistent audience that it is there watching the show.

So there are two things that people seem to be talking about when talking about the self. Communication often fails because people think they are talking about the same thing when they are not. One is the subject of experience. The other is some kind of structure of self-representation, or a form of experience. One is awareness, the other is content. One is seer, one is scene/seen. It is important to make clear what we are bringing into question then when we question the self. Is it the subject itself, or the self-idea? — petrichor

But the issue that moves further on from this is, why "I think"? Why not I believe, I feel, I care, I sense, and so on? And then there is the issue of thinking: Thinking is one thing, thinking about thinking is another. So when I am going about my usual business, I am not aware that I am thinking when I do my taxes or plan for an event or wait for a bus. I am simply doing my taxes, planning and waiting. The "I" only steps in when one stands apart from activities and posits itself. There is no "I" doing taxes, only the doing of the taxes. The I exists when it becomes an object of thought. The point is that this I never really makes an appearance at all in the analysis of everyday affairs. And when one pulls away from these to posit the I, one is no longer identified with any of this about taxes or planning something.

The real question is that when one makes this move toward the I affirmation, is this an existential move, or is it just an ordinary change of attention? It can be taken as a dramatic move toward the Real, for one thereby steps out of any possible particular object relation, and into an object free state, for the I is not presented as an object at all. It is the "presence behind" the inquiry. If such a presence is Real, it is NOT a typical case in the natural order of relating. It is a step into metaphysics.

This is true, but I am claiming that there is a crucial, essential part of the self that is different than a claim to knowledge, though also related to the "historical dimension" of "language and culture"--what I am calling our "conformity". — Antony Nickles

Well, did you not just "say" this? There is no escaping this nature of language as an historically evolving and contingent phenomenon (and talk about such indeterminacy, Derrida brings it all to another level). It is not, of course, that that what you say about conformity and this essential part of the self is not true; it is no less true then, perhaps, some social theory of the self or evolution. I mean it has speculative merit. But out of context, it is not as if the world is speaking what it is outside of propositional possibilities.

This is also a very interesting point of comparison. My Husserl being basically non-existent, I looked through the "General Introduction of Pure Phenomenology" where he discusses the, as I read it, "effecting" of the self--his term: "Ego" (p. 273). I see a connection in that he takes an act "effecting" the ego as separate from an act that does not (analogous to conformity; when nothing unexpected is happening or we are not at a moral crisis). Of note for me, he also sees the assertion of the self as an event, not a constant (in our "self"); that its "existence" comes and goes, lives and dies he says. — Antony Nickles

Husserl's move is Cartesian and it is worth looking into because of the nwo Husserlians like Emanuel Levinas, Michel Henry, et al, and keeping in mind that Heidegger would not have been possible without Husserl. Anyway, you might find this interesting from the text you mentioned:

.....a new standpoint must be available which in spite of the switching off of this psycho-physical totality of nature leaves something over—the whole field of absolute consciousness. Thus, instead of living naively in experience (Erfahrung), and subjecting what we experience, transcendent nature, to theoretical inquiries, we perform the “phenomenological reduction”. In other words : instead of naïvely carrying out the acts proper to the nature-constituting consciousness with its transcendent theses and allowing ourselves to be led by motives that operate therein to still other transcendent theses, and so forth—we set all these theses “out of action”, we take no part in them ; we direct the glance of apprehension and theoretical inquiry to pure consciousness in its own absolute Being.

Yes, he really did say that. What he calls transcendent is the world of things "out there," essentially Descarte's world res extensa-- things that are not me, and so epistemically transcend my reach. His priority cannot be the transcendent natural world, for this cup, this fence post, and so on, are themselves only accessed through what it is that connects one to these things. The self? It is the stream of consciousness that is intuitively and irreducibly there. This is the foundation for any knowledge claim at all.

And he goes on about his "intentionality" of connectivity. Most analytic philosophers have little patience for this line of thinking mostly because they are fed up with any hint of Kantian thinking.

Ego 'lives' exclusively in a new cogito. The earlier cogito 'fades away,' sinks into 'darkness'.... the Ego does not live in them as an “effecting subject.” With that the concept of act is extended in a determined and quite indispensable sense. ...the act-effectings make up the “position-takings” in the widest sense... [those] of negation or affirmation with respect to existential claims or the like would belong here.
— Id.

Although Husserl is elsewhere stuck in the picture of us as an internal constant and cause (my intending etc.)--which I hope we can avoid getting mired in--I take him here to be touching on the self as "affirmed" in "taking" a "position", which I take as analogous to a position in relation to society's judgments and criteria. — Antony Nickles

Well, it is the phenomenological method. Sounds like his Phenomeology of the Consciousness of Time. The value of this kind of thinking is, for me, critical for an understanding of the world. This method takes inquiry to subjective time where presuppositions of time are examined, that is, at the actual genesis of the moment's content which is laid out fully in Fink's Sixth Meditation. This thinking takes the self at its generative beginning, The self here "is the transcendental existence [Existenz] of the egological stream of life in the full concreteness of its living present. Again, the first thing that can be laid hold of in this concreteness is the flowing life of experience in its flowing present actuality." (Fink p.6)

I think the analytical direction of this is right. It is not the kind of thing Anglo American philosophy likes to think about, much to its detriment, for all claims must begin with the source if it is going to be responsible to philosophy (which is really the point, this inquiring at the most basic level).

Also note the image of "fades away", which is similar to Descartes slipping back into the "law of custom" and Rousseau's picture of silence as consent to the general will. This seems to match up with Husserl's "non-effecting" acts. — Antony Nickles

Non effecting acts? I think Husserl is here referring to hyletic data, the actual perceptual experience of the pure intuition. Kenneth Williford puts it llike this:

These data are “immanent” in consciousness; they survive the phenomenological reduction. They
partly ground the intuitive or “in-the-flesh” aspect of perception, and they have a
determinacy of character that we do not create but can only discover

Do not create, that is, "effect".

But this is a passing attempt to make a connection (I have more to read of his); I leave it to you to see if there is a ball to pick up in this regard. Thank you for widening the discussion. — Antony Nickles

And thank you for that Rousseau connection. I will look into this.

Phenomenology rules!

If this is true, it means, as a consequence, that what you said has a meaning exclusively inside your narrative, you are inside your narrative as soon as you think and talk. As such, what you said cannot be considered objectively true, because it is inevitably conditioned by itself. In other words, what you said is meaningless.
Consider that what I have written now, in this message, comes from agreeing with you: I started by saying “If this is true...”. As a consequence, you cannot object anything to what I have said, because objecting to what I have said would mean objecting to yourself. — Angelo Cannata

You have put your finger on the pulse of the matter. Consider how a physicalist's reality falls apart instantly, for if experience yields to a physical reduction, then the saying that something is physical is also duly reduced! It IS absurd to think this way.

I did say the narrative is the starting place, the historical narrative that runs through all possible discussion and defines the "potentiality of of possibilities" as Heidegger put it, for each. Narratives are open hermeneutically, but then, IN this openness we have to deal with the givenness of the world that is not language and culture, like this sprained ankle I have and its pain, or the palpable encounter (as Michel Henry puts it) of living and experiencing. Language encounters what is not language IN the context of its own contingency. This is where Wittgenstein feared to go, this "world" of impossible presence. Levinas was not so afraid, for he rightly understood that this radical other and Other of the world is the intrusion of a palpable metaphysics, not merely a senseless abstract idea.

Phenomenology is the final resting place of philosophical inquiry, where it doesn't so much rest as it invites one to yield (Heidegger's version of gelassenheit) one's egoic totality in order to attend to what is there for meditative thought. What is revealed is not a finished matter at all. Quite the opposite.

Even when you tell yourself your internal story, you cannot deduce that you exist, because, whenever you make use of the idea of existence, you are making use of the mental structures of your brain. You can never take control of these structures, because you cannot think of them without using them again. If you think that this is evidence that your mind and your mental structures exist, it becomes automatically evidence that you are using them and, consequently, you have no control on what you are talking about. So, at the end, talking about existence, even our own existence while we are thinking about it, is completely meaningless: as soon as you think it has a meaning, you are automatically saying that you are a machine that is manoeuvred by that meaning, so that you cannot say anything meaningful about what you are talking about. — Angelo Cannata

Keep in mind, Angelo Cannata, that any talk about mental structures also belongs that personal narrative. Structures? What structures? You mean the ones that are at the causal foundation for any talk at all? This is the consequence of suggesting some physicalist bottom line: what is physical is first the narrative about what is physical. A brain is posited AS a brain, then it fits into a context of understanding.

It begins with the narrative, or story, if you like: language and culture are the historical dimension of knowledge claims. The only hope one has to go further than this lies with phenomenology (the one true view?).

There isn't a case to make, that's just how pain is. That's also not what I am arguing. Some knowledge claims have a center, where it is irrelevant what you think or feel about them. Others do, like pain. Context changes pain and feeling, it always has since our emotions are dependent on stimuli among other things. You haven't really shown how it's not otherwise. — Darkneos

Our emotions are dependent on stimuli. But the hard knowledge claims of science you want to endorse are also dependent on stimuli. You "observe" the distant star with, after all, your senses. There are no relevant data about the world that is not like this. So at least the apprehension of reaches this level of epistemic authority.
But then, we are not acknowledging something like a star's quantifiable features, which is locked into a set of science's paradigms, are we. Something "interpretatively distant": For in empirical science, evidence is inductively produced, through repeated observation and consistency of data. Here, the data is immediately apprehended and not theoretically discursive. This is an important point about discussing ethics/aesthetics/affectivity (essentially all the same thing, says Wittgenstein. He is right): The feeling of burning flesh is not derived through a series of justificatory premises, as is, say, a proposition about time/space or plate tectonics. One doesn't "learn" this. It therefore has this extraordinary direct apprehension. Granted, we do study pain, write books about it, and the neurobiological events associated with it, but think: all of these studies are, if you will, products of discursive objective thinking and do not have the privileged status of immediate apprehension. And most importantly: any study has its sensory foundation on which it builds a complex understanding. All sciences presuppose sensory (I don't use this term. Too Kantian) givenness, and therefore, there is the claim that all science is analytically reducible to just this, as in Kant's, sensory intuitions are blind without concepts; concepts without sensory intuitions are empty.

Postmodernism has a use in the social sciences and literature, but not in science. Despite what they think not every truth is rooted in a cultural or social context. Also you're kinda just rambling now, not making much sense. Though no, that is not what postmodernists are saying either. To be honest I don't think the field ever recovered from the Sokal Affair. — Darkneos

Insulting talk about rambling has no place in a discussion. Don't be a child.

Heidegger and Husserl are not easy to read, and post modern thought, Derrida, Levinas, Jean luc Marion, et al, are all post-Heideggerians. If you think post modern thought is only good for literature, think again about writers like Maurice Blancho or Beckett. In calling up language, which constitutes literature, we are asked to study the very nature of the utterance itself, and the consciousness that holds it, repeats it, and further, it is surmised that consciousness IS language. This starts with Kant, actually, who never spoke like this, but opened space to infer it.
Science is a particle of language. And if you don't study what language is as a dimension of a conscious event, you will never understand the ontology of science. Keep in mind one thing: Time. If you are a pragmatist, and I think you said you were, then you have a means to move into Heidegger, who held a similar view. All knowledge is forward looking, and so science's claims are forward looking, i.e., temporal constructions.

My complaint is that there is no way out of this to affirm something beyond this. The world is Heraclitus', not Parmenides', you might say.

Sokel Affair? I think you looked up in Wikipedia: nasty things people can say about postmodernism and found something. One can do this with anything. It is not as if Kant through Hegel, etc., and then Derrida are thereby undone. This is the kind of mentality, this "let me Wikipedia that, or ask someone in social media" mentality that is killing intellect in this generation.

Read philosophy if you want to know what it is. None of this armchair juvenility. Stop posting and read.

I don't know and I'm not entirely sure it does, ask the Buddhists monks. Though they'll tell you there is no logic behind it and words can't describe it. — Darkneos

Buddihsts are like Wittgenstein: they are right about what they do, wrong that one cannot talk about it. See the Abhidhamma: It does talk about ultimate reality and has extraordinary things to say, that is, if you are a serious meditator. But it's analyses are mostly dogmatic, though, they may be right. Hard to say since one needs to learn Pali. But I noticed it doesn't have the rigorous analysis of Husserl's Ideas or Levinas' Totality or Derrida's Margins. You CAN talk about these things, but only indirectly, which makes the field difficult because this because the material before is obscure to language, and this is because of a lack of shared experience. They say tibetan Buddhists had/have an mysterious language filled with references to things encountered only in deep meditation.

This is still more rambling, whatever point you're trying to make here just seems lost. I don't think like this because there isn't really much value to it. Science isn't outside it's purview though. If anything it probably won't be long before we're able to explain everything since the brain is the root of it all. Neuroscience is certainly advancing faster and faster, though hopefully climate change doesn't get us before then.

If this is philosophy you're more or less proving my point about how useless it is. 5 pages of you typing screeds, going on tangents, and people asking you what the point is and still nothing. I'm honestly just convinced this is more ego stroking than getting at any point that is meaningful or useful, or both. It honestly reminds me of how I used to be.

I'll repeat, it just sounds like you want reality to be something it just isn't and won't be. — Darkneos

People don't read philosophy. That is why they don't get it. Simple as that. I have encountered some who, finding that they really know nothing at all about what they post , like yourself, are inspired to read after our exchanges. One reason why I go on. You may not admit it to me, but later you will perhaps read to see what it is you have been attacking so vacantly.

Have a lovely time with Heidegger. Rorty considered him, along with Dewey and Wittgenstein, to be among the greatest philosopher of the 20th century. Being and Time is literally life changing.

Later.....perhaps.

Nope, once again. There really isn't another way to put it, it's not unambiguously bad. — Darkneos

Again no, pain is not an absolute let alone and existential absolute. You really want there to be something solid don't you. Recent philosophies suggest pain to be an illusion and given what some monks can do there may be truth to that, or at least it seems so. — Darkneos

It's not, this has been shown to be false hundreds of times via science. — Darkneos

Yes it can. — Darkneos

He was wrong.

I'm giving short answers here because literally nothing you have given is some kinda core aspect to life, not even pain. Ethics and value are discussed literally every day, they aren't given they are made by us. Good and bad can be reverse and they often are.

Again, you REALLLLLLY want reality to be something other than it is and it's....just not. — Darkneos

But really, Darkneos, all this says is no. You have to come to grips with this and try harder to actually make a case. I can help you:

You would have to show how context changes pain and any affectivity at all, in the same way the knife's sharpess changes from good to bad given the context of its appearance. You see this, right? You are trying to make the claim that pain qua pain is context determined. There is a very good work on this by Stanley Fish in his Is There a Text in this Class: He argues that context makes the determination, and apart from this, there is no "center" of knowledge claims. All is contingent, just as you are defending here. A student asks if there is a text in the class coming up soon, but the prof is confused: does she mean text to be a textbook? Or is it the that the student left her book and is looking for it? Or, does the prof have a textual frame of reference for the way the ideas will be discussed?

You see this?: text, text or text, three alternative possibilities, each very different, ambiguously in play, at once! This is contingency, and it is the kind of thing post modern thinking is about, this loss of determinacy in foundations of meaning. Is the world not like this when language speaks it's truths?

I know you don't want to think like this, but I am guessing since this is a strain of philosophical thought that dominates our age, and really: it is on YOUR side of tis issue, that it might be useful to you the next time you you defend your, well, curmudgeon-ism.
Science doesn't think like this because it is thematically outside its purview. That is, it simply don't take up questions like this, just as astronomers do not take up basket weaving. It is simply not what they do. This is philosophy, an essentially apriori "science."

"Recent philosophies suggest pain to be an illusion?" Fascinating! tell me how works: how can it be that my toothache is illusory?

Think you meant historical there, even then it's still not true. But it can be mitigated for what it is, also suffering for the greater good is suffering differently, way differently in fact. — Darkneos

No, it's not. Not taken as it stands in itself. Context can be brought to bear, but this changes nothing regarding the occurrent pain. Your burning finger against the lighted match be matched against some competing utility, and contextually, one here may conclude it is right to apply the match. It may spare millions some unspeakable agony. But apart from an ethical context like this, the stand alone pain is absolute. The proof for this lies in the presence of the unmitigated pain itself and the failure to contextually change what it is.

Nor does the historical context have any bearing, for this as well cannot be shown to mitigate the pain qua pain. Indeed, nothing can, which is why it is an absolute; but more: an existential absolute! This is not like Kant's pure reason or causality (found in his categories, but causality is especially poignant--so easy to demonstrate intuitively). It is in existence itself, not as an apriori principle, but an apriori actuality. A Real with a capital 'R'.

A most important point in this: I am arguing that it is affectivity that is at the heart of what Truth and Reality IS. Affectivity of any kindcannot be mitigated or altered. Consider the idea of the "good" (which Wittgenstein, btw, called divinity). There are two kinds of good. What is contingently good is found in valuations about, say a good knife. A good knife is sharp, well balanced, etc., but then, what if the knife is for Macbeth? Then the sharpness is now a bad quality. This is called contingency, and this is the kind of thing you refer, I believe, to in your alternative historical settings. Ethical good and bad are very different. The good and bad cannot be reversed. It can be confusing in the entanglements of the facts of the world, but in direct and unambiguous cases, like your finger on fire, there is crystal clarity.

This is why Wittgenstein insisted that ethics and value cannot be discussed: They are IN the givenness of the world, and are irreducibly what they are. We can argue about contingencies, but not about ethics/aesthetics/value AS SUCH!

Given human history yes it is very possible to deny that is bad. — Darkneos

The pain is ahistorically bad. It cannot be mitigated for what it is, only how for how it stands against competing interests, and such things are, of course, variable among cultures. But the child, say, who suffers for the greater good, does not thereby suffer differently.

Say what you will but certainty is more a myth humans tell themselves because of anxiety. — Darkneos

But the matter turns to the notorious good and bad of ethics. Is it at all possible to deny a lighted match on living flesh is "bad"?

Synthetic apriori truth is tall order indeed. — plaque flag

Never been refuted, only ignored.

And certainty is nonsense regardless of what you think. — Darkneos

Yes, Darkneos, I am familiar with the philosophy of "Bah Humbug!"

I have "taken this question seriously" but what it come down to is all I have is experience and experimentation through experience. If that's not good enough then it sounds like a you problem. You say you're not denying knowledge o the world at all but honestly your posts say otherwise. — Darkneos

when you say you have taken it seriously, then what is it, exactly, taken seriously: who have you read and what do you think about what they said. Your refutation sound more like exasperations. But I don't find any real claims. Pls let loose your insights.

Understanding the fossil record has nothing to do with philosophy bud, that's all science. Dating techniques, looking at positions in the rock layers, stuff like that. Again you're just making this harder than it needs to be. "serious philosophy" just sounds like you stroking your own ego. — Darkneos

No, you miss the point: knowledge of anything requires inquiry into that thing. You don't inquire philosophically, therefore you don't understand its issues.

It is not about ego. It is about basic reading. You need to do this, then your anxieties on this will disappear.

The "Structure of consciousness", at this point I'm really starting to have major doubts about you (as if the primordial origin wasn't enough). The only philosophy of existence that is worth a damn IMO is ethics or how to live. As to the relation of the brain and the world, brain constructs a best guess of reality based on the input of the senses, that's what the evidence shows. — Darkneos

Yes, ethics. But how to live depends not simply on setting up a system for personal behavior: such a system needs a grounding in the understanding. Christians have a system, time honored and useful. But it comes with a metaphysics that is confused and dangerous. Philosophy is the tool to discover where things go wrong and how they might be reviewed and revised.
You likely have similar problems in the basic justifications of how to live, and I say this because you seem to be admitting that such a review is useless. Fundamentalists of all stripes think just like this, embracing foolishness, then reifying it in the public consensus.

Stuff like the Evil Demon, simulation, etc are nice games to play but they are useless to think about because they don't impact your life. — Darkneos

They certainly do impact your life if you want to understand things beyond what "people say". Descartes' evil demon is just to demonstrate a point, like Schrodinger's cat. Not just a game, but an illustrative game.

You're not really curious about this stuff, I think you're just looking to appear "smart" by asking "the big questions". I used to be like that. But after much experience I realized that a lot of the "important questions" of philosophy didn't really matter that much. — Darkneos

But that is just tough talk. Much experience doing what? Reading philosophy? Or just living? Reminds me of Thoreau who tested the wisdom of age by interrogating old people, only to find their years of experience was never a source of wisdom. Just disappointing bad thinking.

Again this just sounds like more ego stroking, I asked a while ago what the point is to any of this and you haven't given anything. You're all over the place, writing more than you need to, and deliberately being unclear in your communications (other posters are able to do it but you choose not to). This just sounds to me like you want to be special or unique for wrestling with such things. — Darkneos

Sorry you don't like my writing. It does belong to a different thematically oriented tradition. One has to read about this to see it. I put it out there unapologetically because this is a philosophy club, and as I see it, continental philosophy is what philosophy really is about. You've read Hume?? You should understand then that philosophical language can be tedious. Spinoza? Leibniz? And yet, no patience for talk about the structures of consciousness. This is just crazy.

I wouldn't say causality produces meaning, we do. It's actually a feature of our brains, we are meaning making machines. It's called pareidolia, it's how you can see a smiley face as a face even though it ain't really a face.

Not really sure what you mean by IN meaning or ARE meaning, it's just meaning. But then again heaven forbid you make yourself clear or explain yourself. My guess is that you are IN meaning when you think, you aren't meaning. — Darkneos

It is an important distinction: to be IN an environment implies that this environment is somehow outside or apart from one. I am saying, onw is not IN an environment like this in discussing experiential structure: Rather, one IS the the very structure one analyzes. It is a turning toward one's own existence for discovery, for, after all, the issue here is the relation between ME an that fence post, so what I AM and the distinctions that descriptively rise up when I try to make sense of something like "I experience a fence post" call for a sharp division between us. But is there such a thing? Does the traditional analysis of S knows P make any sense at all when it comes to identifying and releasing P from the justificatory conditions of believing P?

THIS is a very big question to philosophy. The fence post is "over there", granted; but my knowing is over here, on my side of the epistemic fence. What can possibly account for this? A fascinating question.

I mean it is obvious to everyone that we are limited in our ability to understand and know things around us. That all we will ever get is a close enough or good enough understanding of things, because you don't know what you don't know. I find it odd that someone so versed in philosophy doesn't understand that there are some problems that have no solution. Like the problem of solipsism, there is no way to get outside of your perspective so whether there is a world outside or not you'll never know and there's nothing you can do about it. Or Descartes about what can be known for certain, and you can't truly know if you're being deceived or not. There is a great degree of faith that comes with living after all.

And most people seem to do just fine knowing there won't be total certainty, because life goes on.

Curiosity is fine and all that but it does have to have a goal in mind and at times you have to be able to recognize when you simply can't. So far people have asked you what the point of all this is and as far as anyone can tell there doesn't seem to be one. It just goes in circles. — Darkneos

Well, speaking of circles, there is Heidegger, who I quoted earlier from his Origin of the Work or Art. A great passage where he puts the ideas succinctly:

But how are we to be certain that we are indeed basing such an examination on art
works if we do not know beforehand what art is? And the nature of art can no more be
arrived at by a derivation from higher concepts than by a collection of characteristics
of actual art works. For such a derivation, too, already has in view the characteristics
that must suffice to establish that what we take in advance to be an art work is one in
fact. But selecting works from among given objects, and deriving concepts from principles, are equally impossible here, and where these procedures are practiced they are a
self-deception.
Thus we are compelled to follow the circle. This is neither a makeshift nor a defect.
To enter upon this path is the strength of thought, to continue on it is the feast of
thought, assuming that thinking is a craft. Not only is the main step from work to art a
circle like the step from art to work, but every separate step that we attempt circles in
this circle.

Heidegger believes that truth is "made" but the engagement of pursuing truth is an openness that has extraordinary VALUE, and I emphasize this because in this value is the true foundation of human cognition, which is one way to put what I have been arguing. The circle is hermeneutics. The disclosure within this is momentous. This is my position. Observe the value/aesthetic/ethical dimension of our existence, and do not simply register this as a premise, but realize this is "the place" inquiry truly seeks!

A very strong philosophical position. I am saying that Truth is really an endeavor of affectivity. We divide knowledge into categorical parts to pragmatically address our essentially problematic confrontation with the world, but this has led to the current illusion that truth is statistical, logical, rational, while affect is altogether unwelcome in describing truth (indeed, emotion has historically been willfully ignored). This is patently wrong.

As to certainty: this is not nonsense. But only if you are interested.

As I listen to music I "know" implicitly the many contexts that are there
— Astrophel

I think I know what it is to know.
— Astrophel


Why is it, and what does it mean, that know is given two significations here? What do the scare quotes in the one but missing from the other, indicate? — Mww

When I listen to music, the knowledge is implcit, like when you walk down the street it is impliciit that the pavement will yield to your step and so on. You don't think about this, but you do know it in a justificatory way: a long history of walking down the street, the basic physics of physicality, and so forth informs the occasion.
When I say I think I know what it is to know, I am making a statement of a knowledge claim explicitly, not referring to things implicit. Knowing is a field of interest, like botany or knitting. I think I know what this is at the basic level.

But I just did! I said that the expression "I think that" can be replaced by "I believe that", which indicates a simple belief, not a "justified" or "true" one. — Alkis Piskas

I can't imagine a simple belief without justification, even if it is wrong. I mean, I truly can't conceive of this. Knowledge is supposed to take belief to a notch higher, for confirmation that P is true has to be established. This IS the trickiest part, for one has to pry loose from justification the independence of P, and this, I argue, can't be done: every attempt to affirm P constitutes an inclusion of the justificatory evidence that affirms it. The issue that haunts the whole affair is, "How do you know?"

But belief without justification? I don't see it.

But I explained that too, and I gave you an example. Besides, saying "something that is true cancels it being possible" is almost the same thing. This what "incompatible" means: impossible to exist together, simultanesously and in harmony, without conflict. — Alkis Piskas

Yes, but I am having trouble understanding this cancelation.

No, this is not what I'm saying at all. Saying "not possible" (negative) changes the whole logical structure. I said that if something is said to be true "it cannot be also possible". Please read back what I said.

I have the impression that what we are doing is straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel. And this can go ad infinitum.

I don't consider this as a constructive, fruitful or even meaningful discussion ... — Alkis Piskas

Well then, I'll assume the fault is mine. Apologies.

Not really. As to not to the point you don't really seem to have one but that's neither here nor there. Also it doesn't really "get into your head" so much as you are able to experience and act in it if you are conscious and active. It's actually really easy to conceive of it but you are making this hard than it needs to be IMO. — Darkneos

Well, this just says you haven't a clue. A bit like the Christian who insists through Jesus redemption arrives, but when asked how defers to faith.

If knowledge is justified true belief, and I am sure it is just this, and you believe "ability to experience" yields a justification, then show this. It is NOT that I am denying that we do have knowledge of the world AT ALL! It is rather that when you take this question seriously, you are forced to reconstrue everything everything you believe vis a vis basic questions.

Science itself is a form of pragmaticism to a degree. It's focus is on testable and observable phenomenon and then it tries to generate explanations about what's going on. Granted it won't ever be complete but it's efficacy so far seems good to me.

As far as anyone knows it does reveal the way the world is given what it has done so far. — Darkneos

Anyone, that is, who does not think about serious philosophy. If scientists never tried to understand the fossil record, we would not at all have a concept in place about geologic eras and their subcategories. This is what happens when one chooses not to think.

Philosophy's pursuit might be rooted in emotion but I fail to see how that changes anything. From where I stand no claim is useful philosophically because, in my experience, you can argue anything about anything and end up nowhere. If your claim can't apply to reality or affect my life in any capacity then it's kinda worthless. Otherwise we're just naval gazing, which is fine if it's just you. I also think you're just being deliberately obtuse as you aren't making yourself clear nor are you getting to any point from what I see. — Darkneos

No Darneos; you have it all wrong. This is because you haven't "read" your way into the discussion about the structure of consciousness. It is the only way into a philosophy of existence.

You should at least be curious as to the epistemic relation between a brain and a world. I mean, to have no analytic inquiry about this at all behind you, yet to come out swinging as you do....curious, and then some.

Incorrect, the world of our understanding doesn't rest on intuition, not even close. We simply take a few things as a given and work from there. I already explained that intuition isn't good as science shows the universe doesn't work according to it. If anything I'd wager it resets on experimentation, we try things and see what works.

I know objects can move themselves if I see they have a way to propel themselves without the need of some outside force to move them.

There is no reductive account of what experience "really is" it's simply experience. Neurons and signals and all that stuff firing and processing sensory data. We know the brain does this as we have a ton of evidence to back it, and so far nothing to the contrary. Your last part is just nonsense. The brain is just there, the phenomenon doesn't generate it.

There is no issue here you just want there to be one.

Again, this all just reads like someone who wants reality to be something other than it actually is. — Darkneos

Causality is apodictic. Try imagining its contradiction.

The brain: but there is the brain and there is fence post. How does this work, exactly, or even vaguely, such that the former knows the latter. You take a philosopher like Quine, one of my favorites because he was an explicit naturalist in the Deweyan tradition, yet so revered in analytic philosophy, and you find nothing but frustration when it comes to accounting for how it is that causality, which he takes as foundational in explaining the world, produces meaning; and this has to be taken as priority: when you THINK at all, you are not IN meaning, but ARE meaning.
But such questions that apply to this kind of thinking have to begin with curiosity. One has to be motivated by seeing the deficit in human understanding at the basic level. If you don't see this, you really have no motivation, and end up in the back of the class sleeping.

Question: why take this class at all?

The pain perhaps not, but is this any more convincing of a material reality than Dr Johnson attempting to refute Berkeley by kicking a stone? — Tom Storm

Or Moore's Here is one hand, or Diogenes against Zeno?

One has to draw a distinction between something like being "appeared to redly" and aesthetics/value judgments. Judgment itself is a contingent matter because language is historical and pragmatic, and these do not provide the basis for the strong ontological claim sought here, I mean the discovery of the Real that is entirely non arbitrary.
This is absolute, this non arbitrary phenomenon, and it is aesthetic/value dimension of our existence. The Really Really? It is the aesthetic/ethical: precisely what philosophy has always been making such pains to ignore!
It is a quasi-Cartesian argument, if interested.