Yes, although I'd prefer to say there is no 'deep' subject and that in the final analysis being is also non-being.
. — FrancisRay

:up:

All is הֶבֶלl .





NASB Translation :
breath (5), delusion (2), emptily (1), emptiness (2), fleeting (2), fraud (1), futile (1), futility (13), idols (7), mere breath (2), nothing (1), useless (1), vain (3), vainly (1), vanity (19), vanity of vanities (3), vapor (1), worthless (2)

Nobody can understand philosophy for us. But what I;m suggesting is that you don't need to be a great thinker to do this. One just has to take account of the facts. — FrancisRay

I agree that we don't have to be a great thinker in the sense of obtaining a great breakthrough that'll get us in the canon. But we do have to understand some of the great thinkers, and this involves being them in a certain sense, seeing the world as they saw, with the help of their words. I agree that facts are important, but we also have to think (reason carefully from or on the facts.)

Note that they are only great thinkers in the first place because, having understood them, we feel empowered, that we see things more clearly. So it's always about the ideas, the 'theorems.'

Hmm. I see no reason to make this assumption.It;s something to work out or explore, not to preempt with assumptions. — FrancisRay

That's just it. I simply take experience as experience, as 'real.' It's you (in my view) who are simply deciding to ignore this or that aspect of experience.

Note that 'real' tends to have a merely practical or honorific use. It matters whether I 'actually' paid the rent or just dreamt it. But dreams exist, as do prime numbers.

Maybe, but this would have nothing to do with whether or not it is unreal and some sort of illusion.. — FrancisRay

It tries to give meaning to a metaphor --- or to a tendency to treat some experience as somehow 'unreal.'

That metaphysical questions are undecidable is not a view any more than that F=MA is a view. — FrancisRay

As I see it, we all see the same world, but we do see from different positions. You see the world and understand metaphysical questions are undecidable so that the claim fits or articulates the world.

You give offer your testimony. But (as I've stressed elsewhere), saying that P is true is just saying that you believe P. Is just claiming P. Your testimony is your testimony. And that's it.

To quote Wittgenstein:

"p" is true, says nothing else but p.
https://archive.org/stream/notebooks191419100witt/notebooks191419100witt_djvu.txt
See 6.10.14

"P" is the structure of the world 'given to me,' the [slice of the ] world I am.

It is said that full enlightenment is union with reality, the death of the individual and the ego.and the transcendence of life and death. To be a little enlightened would be to have glimpsed beyond the veil and realised the possibility of being fully enlightened. Not many people can be authoritative on this topic but there is plenty of literature. — FrancisRay

Recall that I don't acknowledge authority in this context. I'll consider claims. But vanity and delusion are always with us. As humans we easily get drunk on talk of round squares. We get drunk on talk that must remain cloudy, so that it's relative emptiness is hidden for us. There's a joke about a woman being a Monet [the painter ]. From far away she's beautiful. Close up she's a mess.

Much of Spiritual talk is like that. It's dependent on a distance effect ('the envelope in the letter') which includes the-subject-who-is-supposed-to-know. Before long you;ve got people who are content merely believing that someone is Enlightened but not really concerned to get there themselves. The belief in the distant possibility suffices (hence the envelope being the letter, with mere promise enjoyed as performance.)

Note that I don't take binary talk of Enlightenment seriously, though I do think some human beings are superior to others in this or that way. Still, everything flows. The self is not like a stone. I can fall off my 'horse.' I can get back on.

I am a non-dualist ontologically speaking, but I am not a non-distinctionist epistemologically speaking. In the non-dual context there are no distinctions but I don't think it follows that there are no differences, but rather just that there is no separation. — Janus

This is difficult to parse. Perhaps you mean that consciousness is always consciousness-of ?

How does this sound to you ? I think Sartre intends the same idea.

The Ego is the specific object that intentional consciousness is directed upon when performing reflection—an object that consciousness “posits and grasps […] in the same act” (Sartre 1936a [1957: 41; 2004: 5]), and that is constituted in and by the act of reflection (Sartre 1936a [1957: 80–1; 2004: 20]). Instead of a transcendental subject, the Ego must consequently be understood as a transcendent object similar to any other object, with the only difference that it is given to us through a particular kind of experience, i.e., reflection. The Ego, Sartre argues, “is outside, in the world. It is a being of the world, like the Ego of another” (Sartre 1936a [1957: 31; 2004: 1]).
....
Sartre devotes a great deal of effort to establishing the impersonal (or “pre-personal”) character of consciousness, which stems from its non-egological structure and results directly from the absence of the I in the transcendental field. According to him, intentional (positional) consciousness typically involves an anonymous and “impersonal” relation to a transcendent object:

When I run after a streetcar, when I look at the time, when I am absorbed in contemplating a portrait, there is no I. […] In fact I am plunged in the world of objects; it is they which constitute the unity of my consciousness; […] but me, I have disappeared; I have annihilated myself. There is no place for me on this level. (Sartre 1936a [1957: 49; 2004: 8])

The tram appears to me in a specific way (as “having-to-be-overtaken”, in this case) that is experienced as its own mode of phenomenalization, and not as a mere relational aspect of its appearing to me. The object presents itself as carrying a set of objective properties that are strictly independent from one’s personal relation to it. The streetcar is experienced as a transcendent object, in a way that obliterates and overrides, so to speak, the subjective features of conscious experience; its “having-to-be-overtaken-ness” does not belong to my subjective experience of the world but to the objective description of the way the world is (see also Sartre 1936a [1957: 56; 2004: 10–11]). When I run after the streetcar, my consciousness is absorbed in the relation to its intentional object, “the streetcar-having-to-be-overtaken”, and there is no trace of the “I” in such lived-experience. I do not need to be aware of my intention to take the streetcar, since the object itself appears as having-to-be-overtaken, and the subjective properties of my experience disappear in the intentional relation to the object. They are lived-through without any reference to the experiencing subject (or to the fact that this experience has to be experienced by someone). This particular feature derives from the diaphanousness of lived-experiences.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sartre/#TranEgoDiscInte

I don't see any other coherent way to interpret the fossil record and cosmology. — Janus

For me the issue is semantic. I think of 'physical' objects as enduring possibilities of perception.
I lean toward verificationism when it comes to scientific claims about such objects. How does the ancestral object exist ? If I was there (with a time machine), I could see it. Or as a possible premise in a reasoning that takes such perceptual givenness for granted, without paying any metaphysical tax on that assumption.

The individual’s experience is simply a small, distinctive sphere of limited experience within true experience.

I think this is close to what Leibniz was getting at. Each of us is a kind of copy of the world. But the world has no original. It only exists perspectively. But that's not so much an empirical claim but an appeal to what we can even mean by worldly objects, which gets us back to J S Mill.

57. And as the same town, looked at from various sides, appears quite different and becomes as it were numerous in aspects [perspectivement]; even so, as a result of the infinite number of simple substances, it is as if there were so many different universes, which, nevertheless are nothing but aspects [perspectives] of a single universe, according to the special point of view of each Monad.

https://plato-philosophy.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/The-Monadology-1714-by-Gottfried-Wilhelm-LEIBNIZ-1646-1716.pdf

This same town becomes numerous in aspects. The town stands for the world, which exists only perspectively, in billions of related but differing 'copies' and yet is glued together by our empathy and language. We build the scientific image and so on. We have Heidegger's 'one,' which is a taken-for-granted collective habit of interpretation and practical skill. So we look right through perspectival being itself.

Why ‘the world’s’ being? Could you elaborate on that? — Wayfarer

Sure. Thinking is intrinsically social, and we always use a shared language to intend objects in our shared world. [To deny this claim is a performative contradiction. ] We also discuss all of reality in the same inferential nexus. So my toothache or daydream may come up in a explanation of why I was late for work. A molecule may explain a hallucination. And so on. Our world includes toothaches , promises, prime numbers, and memories. Even this or that entity is in a little pocket of the world like someone's empirical-psychological ego. It's all in the same nexus of rationality. The truth is the whole. No finite-disconnect entity is even intelligible, for one defines or explains it only in terms of other entities. Hence Brandom's so-called 'neorationalism.' And of course Hegel's idealism defined as holism.

The Zen realization that consciousness is radically different, that it is rather the non-dual openness in which both individual and world appear,

:up:

I think this is the same idea. Consciousness in the radical sense (first person sense) is just nondual being.

The question of solipsism has come up several times in this thread. ‘If “the world” is experience alone, then how is solipsism avoided?’ — Wayfarer

The view I've been arguing for is this: there is no 'deep' subject in the first place but only the-world-from-a-perspective.

There are of course empirical-psychological subjects/persons, but crucially these are just entities in the world. My brain is an object in the world, but my 'consciousness' is part of the being of the world. '[First-person] consciousness' just is is. --- just exactly the world's being.

This first part seems close to Husserl especially.

The point to be reached is a foundational consciousness that is unconditional, self-evident, and immediate (svayam-prakāśa). It is that to which everything is presented, but is itself no presentation, that which knows all, but is itself no object. The self should not be confused with the contents and states which it enjoys and manipulates. If we have to give an account of it, we can describe it only as what it is not, for any positive description of it would be possible only if it could be made an object of observation, which from the nature of the case it is not. We "know" it only as we withdraw ourselves from the body with which we happen to be identified, in this transition

the true Self, pure consciousness [...] the only Reality (sat), since It is untinged by difference, the mark of ignorance, and since It is the one thing that is not sublatable"

The longest chapter of Shankara's Upadesasahasri, chapter 18, "That Art Thou," is devoted to considerations on the insight "I am ever-free, the existent" (sat), and the identity expressed in Chandogya Upanishad 6.8.7 in the mahavakya (great sentence) "tat tvam asi", "that thou art."[275][276] In this statement, according to Shankara, tat refers to 'Sat,[276] "the Existent"[266][267][277][278] Existence, Being,[web 16] or Brahman,[279] the Real, the "Root of the world,"[276][note 53] the true essence or root or origin of everything that exists.[267][277][web 16] "Tvam" refers to one's real I, pratyagatman or inner Self,[280] the "direct Witness within everything,"[14] "free from caste, family, and purifying ceremonies,"[281] the essence, Atman, which the individual at the core is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advaita_Vedanta

I believe that ‘consciousness,’ when once it has evaporated to this estate of pure diaphaneity, is on the point of disappearing altogether. It is the name of a nonentity, and has no right to a place among first principles. Those who still cling to it are clinging to a mere echo, the faint rumor left behind by the disappearing ‘soul’ upon the air of philosophy.
...
To deny plumply that ‘consciousness’ exists seems so absurd on the face of it – for undeniably ‘thoughts’ do exist – that I fear some readers will follow me no farther. Let me then immediately explain that I mean only to deny that the word stands for an entity, but to insist most emphatically that it does stand for a function. There is, I mean, no aboriginal stuff or quality of being, contrasted with that of which material objects are made, out of which our thoughts of them are made; but there is a function in experience which thoughts perform, and for the performance of which this quality of being is invoked. That function is knowing. ‘Consciousness’ is supposed necessary to explain the fact that things not only are, but get reported, are known. Whoever blots out the notion of consciousness from his list of first principles must still provide in some way for that function’s being carried on.
...
My thesis is that if we start with the supposition that there is only one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed, and if we call that stuff ‘pure experience,’ the knowing can easily be explained as a particular sort of relation towards one another into which portions of pure experience may enter. The relation itself is a part of pure experience; one if its ‘terms’ becomes the subject or bearer of the knowledge, the knower,[2] the other becomes the object known.

https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/james1.htm

So we all have our own take, but you are suggesting that a movement that takes nondual as its name is really just dualist in the usual way. But that loses the quasi-mystical excitement in the position, its contact with identity with the absolute. That radical intimacy and simplicity is the point, the appeal, the breakthrough. I think it'd be better to reject it than transform it into something reasonable but boring. This was my concern with @Wayfarer in the mind-creates-reality thread to the degree that he was just doing (or seemed to be) the interpretation of Kant that makes him a typical indirect realist, a dualist totally compatible with physicalism, with mental magic being ultimately dependent on its radically hidden basis. To insist on some deep trans-experiential Substance is, in my view, missing the point of nondualism. Though it's a respectable, default position for plenty of solid practical reasons (if not, in my view, logically stable).

unless you are a panpsychist. — Janus

Not at all. There is no subject. There is no consciousness. Not 'really.' Just world-from-perspectives, and not world-from-no-perspective. That's the idea. Nondualism.

Consciousness is being.

Of course: why not? Science certainly seems to show that things existed prior to consciousness; unless you are a panpsychist. — Janus

Of course your view is the popular and dominant view, and ancestral objects deserve serious discussion, but I think it's ontology's job to interpret the claims of science.

For instance, what is an 11-dimensional physical theory supposed to mean ? A cautious approach might propose computable functions as ways to compress and predict measurements in the familiar world of three dimensions.

I say it means that consciousness cannot stand or exist apart from being. — Janus

But being can stand apart from all consciousness ?

It seems to me that to say distinctions begin with consciousness is to articulate a phenomenological observation based on reflection on a question: to wit 'how could there be a distinction without consciousness'? — Janus

I agree that distinctions depend on consciousness, but I understand consciousness as [perspectival ] being itself. Of course this only makes sense, so far as I can tell, in that perspectivistic context. I expect the world to outlast me, in as other worldstreamings.

Consciousness is world-from-perspective, and it's correlated or associated with sentient flesh. So I can talk about whether someone else is conscious or not. Their body (after a head injury perhaps) may or may not be an independent 'site of being' or 'spatial origin' for a 'worldstreaming' --- even as their heart pumps on.

I interpret that to mean that consciousness is not separate from being, not that consciousness is being or that being is consciousness through and through. — Janus

If you don't mind, what do you mean by consciousness is not separate from being ?

I'm looking into nondualism in other traditions.

...there is in reality no duality between the "experiencing self" (jiva) and Brahman, the Ground of Being.

According to Ram-Prasad, "it" is not an object, but "the irreducible essence of being [as] subjectivity, rather than an objective self with the quality of consciousness."[122]

The jivatman or individual self is a mere reflection of singular Atman in a multitude of apparent individual bodies.[9] It is "not an individual subject of consciousness,"[120] but the same in each person and identical to the universal eternal Brahman,[128] a term used interchangeably with Atman.[129]

Atman is often translated as soul,[note 25] though the two concepts differ significantly, since "soul" includes mental activities, whereas "Atman" solely refers to detached witness-consciousness.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advaita_Vedanta

To me this all reads exactly like what I'm calling nondual perspectivism.

"it" is not an object, but "the irreducible essence of being [as] subjectivity,

Being-as-subjectivity is body-centered perspectival worldstreaming. The stream of becoming is pure 'world' (really prior to world or self) but also structured as a person, even seated in a person. Heidegger's Dasein is not a bad description of the character of this being, a doing-of-dishes, a biting-of-nails, a writing-of-non-dual-philosophy.

Here's Hume on selves:

they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement. ...The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations. ... The comparison of the theatre must not mislead us. They are the successive perceptions only, that constitute the mind... — Hume

Given the nature of language/logic, this is perspectival perception of the world [that world's beingthere, in fact] , and so we have world-streamings.

That metaphysical questions are undecidable is also my view. As soon as we say anything like "reality is mind-dependent' or 'being is nothing but consciousnes' we have gone off-track.

Distinctions begin with consciousness. — Janus

I not disagreeing with distinctions begin with consciousness, but I don't so why this isn't the answer to a metaphysical question. I suggest that even positivism is at least implicitly metaphysical.

However far the six contact-media go, that is how far objectification goes. However far objectification goes, that is how far the six contact media go. With the remainderless fading & stopping of the six contact-media [vision, hearing, smell, taste, touch, & intellection] , there comes to be the stopping, the allaying of objectification.

https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/an/an04/an04.174.than.html

Note the media metaphor here, which is all too natural for us. The gates of the eyes, gates of the ears, for the world flow 'in.' And it does in some sense, for the subject is a kind of infinitesimal central vortex, seemingly the body 'for which' it all happens or exists. But this witness is only the verbal-bodily cultural-conventional ego, and this still-worldly ego is an object existing among others ---though crucially 'entangled' somehow with the 'site of being ' --- world-from-perspective.

The perception, "I am the thinker" lies at the root of these classifications in that it reads into the immediate present a set of distinctions — I/not-I; being/not-being; thinker/thought; identity/non-identity — that then can proliferate into mental and physical conflict. The conceit inherent in this perception thus forms a fetter on the mind. To become unbound, one must learn to examine these distinctions — which we all take for granted — to see that they are simply assumptions that are not inherent in experience,

https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/kn/snp/snp.4.14.than.html

Hume dissolved the self. Mach and Heidegger do so in their own ways. I hope it's not too eurocentric to hope for some kind of universal human insight here, which is a product of a universal-enough human logic.

The point for me though is that we cannot understand philosophy unless we can see the mistakes made by Russell and Wittgenstein that prevented then from doing so, and once we have done so they do appear rather foolish. If I make any bold remarks that look naive or deluded then you can always ask me to put my money where my mouth is and justify them. — FrancisRay

I think you should justify your dismissal of Wittgenstein. In my view, you are underrating him. I'm not his agent, and I don't take him for an authority. It's just think he deserves the fame. Same with Heidegger -- though I'd drag into Husserl more and stress some undernoticed early Heidegger (lectures 1919 on.)

Aesthetically, the miracle is that the world exists. That what exists does exist.
....
This is the way I have travelled: Idealism singles men out from the world as unique, solipsism singles me alone out, and at last I see that I too belong with the rest of the world, and so on the one side nothing is left over, and on the other side, as unique, the world. In this way idealism leads to realism if it is strictly thought out.

Is belief a kind of experience?
Is thought a kind of experience?

All experience is world and does not need the subject. — Witt : Notebooks

This is early Wittgenstein. A lean, direct presentation of nondualism. Thou art that. The 'false' (or relatively shallow) subject is of course the body and the psychological-normative subject. But (I think we agree) the 'deep' subject is no longer subject but the very being of the world itself -- its only kind of being (that we can know of, speak of sensibly.)

I once spoke on the phone with George Spencer Brown, a colleague of Russell's, and asked him why Russell had been unable to see the meaning of Brown's book Laws of Form,, which is of vast importance in metaphysics.,despite praising it as presenting a valuable new calculus. He replied in a friendly and wistful tone, 'Ah, Bertie was a fool'. This does appear to be the explanation and it is my view also. — FrancisRay

I've look into that book, but I didn't find it gripping enough to keep going. I may give it another chance. I'm trained as a mathematician, so I recall it being technically daunting. My mere suspicion is that it'll be similar to Wittgenstein somehow, who also worked at the intersection of mysticism and logic. If you care to paraphrase the gist of the work, I'm all ears. What does it mean to you ?

Was 'Bertie' a fool ? Anecdotally, my opinion on him has jumped around. His crude attack on Nietzsche in his history of philosophy is embarrassing, but politics and its intense tribalism brings out the stupid in people. I found him quoted in Szasz lately, and I was impressed by the quotes. The whole I-hate-Hegel thing associated with people like him is annoying, but maybe it's good that some people started from scratch, if only to re-achieve Hegelian insights in a lingo in which they were more at home.

Still, this is all just gossip basically. I think it's good to fess up to biases, but it's not the real work of course. I've 'hated' thinkers who ended up being important to me. So I've learned not to trust initial reactions. It's as if we always first try to save ourselves the trouble of assimilation with an uncharitable reading.

We get distance by detachment, although oddly we also get closeness. But this detachment indicates an underlying truth, which is that there is nothing from which to become detached. It is all illusion, and when we see this we are finally and fully detached. The practice of detachment helps us to achieve it, but to fully achieve it requires enlightenment and an understanding of phenomena. — FrancisRay

I think 'illusion' has to be a kind of metaphor here. As I see it, all 'experience' is 'real.' But of course we make practical distinctions, and the word 'real' mostly functions that way.

In this context, the so-called illusion becomes so with the detachment. I transform the world into an 'empty' spectacle by a change in attitude or investment.

How would you define 'enlightenment'? I've tended to be wary of binary understandings of this word. In my experience, our spiritual focus or transcendence is highly variable. We fall off the ludic hobbyhorse, forget to laugh, forget that all is 'empty' procession (hebel).

I should have made it clear that I think most of western philosophy is also a waste of time. Nobody claims to understand philosophy and it just just goes round and round in circles. In the perennial tradition people who don't understand the topic don't write about it. . . . — FrancisRay

I'll meet you half way. There's a certain type of philosopher who is a fundamentally and even methodically boring. Maybe this is connected to the ways of academia and more generally to the usual conformism of respectable types. All roads lead to a certain sanitized vaguely pro-science political correctness. To saying almost nothing but I'm Clean.

This attitude looks arrogant and deluded to others, since most people think they know that philosophy cannot be understood and is like quantum mechanics, such that anyone who claims to understand it must be unable to understand it. — FrancisRay

I can relate to this in terms of my point above. We might call it idolatry or fame-worship. It's like people believing in genius or insight only at a distance. No one 'here with me in Nazareth' actually gets it.

But I invoke [genuine ] positivism again. What have I experience ? What have I personally verified ? Can I paraphrase the thinkers I pretend to understand ? Can I personally generate proofs or at least make a strong case for my major theses ?

This is part of my rejection of 'Kantianism' (and yet my acceptance of a certain interpretation of Kant). It's pointless to gesture beyond experience, beyond what I understand, except as a mere horizon of possible experience and understanding. The great thinker is only realized (for me) within my own cognition. I have to 'become' that great thinker in order to understand them. So the false humility thing is indeed a confusion, though a true humility with respect to fallible and endless interpretation is fitting.

I don't understand how enlightened self-interest can not yet have reared its head though. — Pantagruel

Prisoner's dilemma, right ? We do manage enlighten self-interest, to some degree, within groups that have enemies. Is it just a coincidence that such groups have enemies ? Like the boundary between the organism and the environment it exploits ?

And of the pleasures of inclusion/exclusion ? The pleasure of being a member of the elite ( or merely maybe having somewhere to climb )? Did we evolve to function as a species ? Or to function in a tribe that sometimes had to wage war ? The idea of the universal human family is beautiful, but perhaps it's the sleeping lion's exotic dream of being a lamb.

I am a cynical and skeptical old man. :sad:

I was an idealist when I was young, but life turned me into a realist. — Agree-to-Disagree

:up:

It's not my approach that is backwards, it's the approach you think I'm taking. I'm just doing philosophy the usual way. A plausible theory must be proved in logic, not just wafted around as an idea. — FrancisRay

:up:

I very much appreciate the clarification and the politeness with which you addressed my concern. To quote an excellent show (The Bear) : heard, chef.

this passage is typical of the hopelessness of western academic philosophy. It depends on the idea that metaphysics is incomprehensible,and we might as well just speculate wildly and in all sorts of complex ways and make life hell for students of the subject. — FrancisRay

But I can't back them up without presenting an argument and this means going back to the undecidability of metaphysical questions. . . — FrancisRay

You yourself say that metaphysical questions are undecidable. That's a fairly positivist claim, it seems to me. The positivists are saying 'we might as well talk nonsense' but just the reverse. There's a serious scientific intention positivism and phenomenology. I do understand that there's a personality type associated with the term. One might fairly expect that a positivist is also a physicalist who hates spiritual traditions. But I say not so fast. Wittgenstein is a famous exception, but we can also think about John Stuart Mill. There's a streak in empiricism that leads directly into the nondual tradition. A strict or serious positivist wants to know, with Berkeley, what 'matter' can even mean if it's not merely patterns in experience. But of course experience is only 'mental' against the contrast of some kind of elusive non-mental stuff. So we get the breakthrough to monist neutral phenomenalist perspectivism --- ontological cubism -- or whatever one wants to call it.

But please don't think the sceptical rational approach is at fault in any way. It;s t he approach I take. I;m suggesting that this approach demands a study of mysticism, and that it this is avoided it is not a sceptical rational approach. — FrancisRay

:up:

I might agree with you here. 'Mysticism' is not easy to define exactly. But I will agree that plenty of 'skepticism' can be close-minded, which is to say that it makes 'unconscious' assumptions.

I ask you not to make that kind of error here tho with my talk of positivism. The basic affirmations of positivism are (1) that all knowledge regarding matters of fact is based on the “positive” data of experience and (2) that beyond the realm of fact is that of pure logic and pure mathematics. What is so offensive in this ? To me it's pretty much the requirement that we know what we are talking about -- that we speak from experience. This is almost a tautology.

It's only a narrow, prejudiced version of positivism that's problematic, in my view. For instance, some people simply assumed that only 'sense data' were given. But this is a complete fiction, a superstition. What we find when we just look is a rich and meaningful lifeworld. Breaking things up into elements (sensations) is a late, sophisticated theoretical act. Now this act has value (Mach used it powerfully), but it is obviously not 'the given' or the 'raw' 'data' of experience. Husserl (inIdeas II, for instance) and Heidegger (in many lectures leading up to and within Being and Time) convincingly sketch the structure of this lifeworld --- of pre-theoretical experience. That's genuine positivism: describing how it is. Not my fancy theory of what it must be.

This is exactly the sort of approach that I would warn everybody to avoid. If we do philosophy like this we will become lost forever in a muddle of ideas and details. — FrancisRay

I'd say that those ideas and details are philosophy. Tho I will grant you that the point is to grasp some 'theorems' of value. In math, for instance, a theorem might be 'obviously' true after a certain amount of experience. But proofs are a kind of hygiene: we make sure we aren't deluded, and we find a ladder to aid the intuition that really matters.

I'm trying to make a case for the centrality of of the issue of subjectivity. I'm not saying we we agree on the details, but we seem to agree on the importance of the issue.

What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world!

I want to report how I found the world.

What others in the world have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience of the world.

I have to judge the world, to measure things.
— The Notebooks

https://archive.org/stream/notebooks191419100witt/notebooks191419100witt_djvu.txt

I have to judge the world. The normative-responsible claim-making mask-choosing ego (not the transcendental ego) is itself already in a quasi-isolated situation, especially in more individualistic societies. I have a vivid 'direct experience' of my little corner of the world, but in a high-tech society, I take so much on trust. I am a good progressive, maybe, who 'trusts the science' --- though this may boil down to trusting a consensus I don't know how to check directly.

What others in the world have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience of the world. The world is 'given to' highly motivated creatures who mostly notice and remember what keeps their body warm and fed. Traditions of history or physics construct a picture of the world without our noses in the foreground. Hence the achievement of forgetting subjectivity, of seeing around one's little household ways and gods. Some updated version of matter moving in void is taken as the truly real.

The status of the color and meaning and culture that we somehow paint on this bottom layer is typically left obscure. Consciousness is a mere paintjob, not being itself. But this suggests our being 'trapped' in the paintjob, and that 'atoms and void' are still merely representation, a kind of instrumental fiction. True reality is forever Out There, though it must exist because we've presupposed mediation, the paintjob, indirect realism. We did this because: nerves, brains, fuctional relationships between bodies and the reports from their mouths. Because we took common sense to be real and trustworthy enough to build the rest of a weird ontology upon --- one throwing into doubt its own foundation.

What is the 'solipsist' trying to say but 'can't' ?

The idea is that the same object may be before his eyes and mine, but that I can't stick my head into his (or my mind into his, which comes to the same) so that the real and immediate object of his vision becomes the real and immediate object of my vision, too. By “I don't know what he sees” we really mean “I don't know what he looks at”, where “what he looks at” is hidden and he can't show it to me; it is before his mind's eye. Therefore, in order to get rid of this puzzle, examine the grammatical difference between the statements “I don't know what he sees” and “I don't know what he looks at”, as they are actually used in our language.

Sometimes the most satisfying expression of our solipsism seems to be this: “When anything is seen (really seen), it is always I who see it”.

What should strike us about this expression is the phrase “always I”. Always who? – For, queer enough, I don't mean: “always L.W.”
...
What tempted me to say “it is always I who see when anything is seen”, I could also have yielded to by saying: “when ever anything is seen, it is this which is seen”, accompanying the word “this” by a gesture embracing my visual field (but not meaning by “this” the particular objects which I happen to see at the moment). One might say, “I am pointing at the visual field as such, not at anything in it”. And this only serves to bring out the senselessness of the former expression.

Let us then discard the “always” in our expression. Then I can still express my solipsism by saying, “Only what I see (or: see now) is really seen”. And here I am tempted to say: “Although by the word “I” I don't mean L.W., it will do if the others understand “I” to mean L.W. if just now I am in fact L.W.”. I could also express my claim by saying: “I am the vessel of life”; but mark, it is essential that everyone to whom I say this should be unable to understand me. It is essential that the other should not be able to understand “what I really mean”, though in practice he might do what I wish by conceding to me an exceptional position in his notation. But I wish it to be logically impossible that he should understand me, that is to say, it should be meaningless, |(Ts-309,109) not false, to say that he understands me. Thus my expression is one of the many which is used on various occasions by philosophers and supposed to convey something to the person who says it, though essentially incapable of conveying anything to anyone else. — The Blue Book

https://www.wittgensteinproject.org/w/index.php?title=Blue_Book

In my view, much rides on our approach to this issue. 'I' see the same object from my perspective. But 'perspective' must be generalized and metaphorical here, because I also include colorblindness and myopia. Indeed, my entire system of beliefs and training meet 'my version' of (or rather are my perspective on) the same object --- same because [our ] language always intends our object in the world.

*****
We might review why we are tempted toward a 'solipsistic' or 'idealistic' position in the first place. Our nose is always in the picture. Our body is always at the center of worldly experience. The 'camera' (the there itself) follows this hungry and fearful body around. What I believe is just how the world is, while I believe it to be that way. If I'm in true uncertainty, the world itself flickers threateningly. The limits of my language are the limits of 'my' world (the world from my perspective.) I will say, in retrospect, that certain dimensions in were invisible or unnoticed by a younger me. I didn't know then there were transfinite numbers or phenomenologists.

Here we differ. I think the problem hinges on the desire to assume responsibility. — Pantagruel

That's a vague response, but to me it seems a bit self-righteous. 'Anyone skeptical about the possibility of utopia is just unwilling to put in the work.' A convenient belief for utopians, too, no ? And not just for those who don't want to waste their lives trying to square the circle, waiting for real life to finally get here, as if life hasn't always existed as a controlled falling. The world has always and always be on fire. That's my view. But we all work in our little lives to beat down the flames. And they always get us in the end.

What schoolmaster has not demonstrated that Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar were driven by such passions and were, consequently, immoral? From which it immediately follows that he, the schoolmaster, is a better man than they because he has no such passions, and proves it by the fact that he has not conquered Asia nor vanquished Darius and porus, but enjoys life and allows others to enjoy it too. These psychologists are particularly fond of contemplating those peculiarities that belong to great historical figures as private persons. Man must eat and drink; he has relations with friends and acquaintances; he has emotions and fits of temper. “No man is a hero to his valet de chambre,” is a well-known proverb; I have added – and Goethe repeated it two years later – "but not because the former is no hero, but because the latter is a valet.” He takes off the hero’s boots, helps him into bed, knows that he prefers champagne, and the like. Historical personages fare badly in historical literature when served by such psychological valets. These attendants degrade them to their own level, or rather a few degrees below the level of their own morality, these exquisite discerners of spirits. Homer’s Thersites, who abuses the kings, is a standing figure for all times. Not in every age, it is true, does he get blows – that is, beating with a solid cudgel – as in the Homeric one. But his envy, his egotism, is the thorn that he has to carry in his flesh; and the undying worm that gnaws him is the tormenting thought that his excellent intentions and criticisms get absolutely no result in the world. One may be allowed a certain glee over Thersites’ fate.
...
nothing is now more common than the complaint that the ideals which imagination sets up are not actualized, that these glorious dreams are destroyed by cold actuality. These ideals, which in the voyage of life founder on the rocks of hard reality, may be merely subjective to begin with and belong to the peculiarity of an individual who regards himself as supremely wise.
...
In asserting good intentions for the welfare of the whole and exhibiting a semblance of goodheartedness, it can swagger about with great airs. It is easier to discover the deficiency in individuals, in states, and in Providence, than to see their real meaning. For in negative fault-finding one stands nobly and with proud mien above the matter, without penetrating into it and without comprehending its positive aspects. Age generally makes people more tolerant; youth is always discontented.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hi/introduction.htm

To me phenomenology is a kind of positivism. Husserl : We [phenomenologists] are the true positivists.

The basic affirmations of positivism are (1) that all knowledge regarding matters of fact is based on the “positive” data of experience and (2) that beyond the realm of fact is that of pure logic and pure mathematics. Those two disciplines were already recognized by the 18th-century Scottish empiricist and skeptic David Hume as concerned merely with the “relations of ideas,” and, in a later phase of positivism, they were classified as purely formal sciences. On the negative and critical side, the positivists became noted for their repudiation of metaphysics—i.e., of speculation regarding the nature of reality that radically goes beyond any possible evidence that could either support or refute such “transcendent” knowledge claims. In its basic ideological posture, positivism is thus worldly, secular, antitheological, and antimetaphysical. Strict adherence to the testimony of observation and experience is the all-important imperative of positivism.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/positivism


It is a more honest or shrewd positivism in that it doesn't simply assume a crude sense-data picture of experience, which indeed is merely a traditional metaphysical prejudice, or a gap between experience and the real world in the first place that goes along with such a picture.

Others take their phenomenology differently, but I like to take in in the spirit of philosophers like Ernst Mach or William James --- in a scientific as opposed to a mystical spirit. Given that positivism is metaphysical in some sense, it must be anti-metaphysical with respect to a certain kind of constructive or 'floating' metaphysical system. Nothing is hidden. Or, more accurately, we concern ourselves with what is 'given,' with what can be checked by all participants in a basically scientific inquiry, but one that includes a 'radical' or 'first-philosophy' investigation of the very meaning of such scientificity.

It cannot be explained by Western thinkers, so they believe metaphysics is incomprehensible. It is explained in the perennial philosophy and in a very simple way, but most philosophers don't think this solution is worth studying .It;s an area of philosophy left blank and marked 'Here be dragons', and this is considered a rational approach to philosophy. . . .. — FrancisRay

To me it seems you are underestimating Western philosophy. The greats have not feared to charge the edges of the map. Lately I've been looking into Husserl, who is bold radical ambitious etc. To me this narrative is (I must be honest ) suspiciously vague. The bad guy is vague and so is the good guy, with the skeptical-discursive Western philosopher as the bad guy of course, and the mystical perennial philosopher as the hero.

You suggest that the skeptical-discursive approach is irrational, but it seems to me you have it backwards. This is just my perspective, but here goes: I take you to be presenting some kind of theory of Direct Insight or Mystical Intuition, associated with a Gnosis that is basically Ineffable. You haven't put it that way, I conceded, but that to me is the gist, the background structure. I could of course be mistaken, but I'll respond to this type of approach in any case.

My issue with that is that the ineffable is either ineffable or it's not. If the true knowledge is trans-conceptual or trans-discursive, then there's a performative contradiction in arguing for it. And showing up to argue something in the first place is the pursuit for recognition discussed by Hegel and Kojeve, manifesting the sociality of reason and the centrality of conversation (dialectic, rationality, discursivity) after all.

I imagine the 'ineffable' sage to be beyond the need for recognition, consistent enough to not bother arguing for what argument can never reveal. Are such people out there ? Probably a few. But they don't show up. Maybe some of them once showed up, but then they realized the futility of talking. I myself embrace the partial futility of talking. Most seeds land where the plant cannot grow.

I see this as an opinion since you cannot prove it. I would suggest it's an unnecessary assumption,and that it's best not to make it. Cartesian doubt and all that. I feel it's best to start with verifiable facts and build on this foundation. — FrancisRay

Just to clarify, I mean simply that there is sound, color, hunger, pain. I mean that there are trumpets and not just the thought of trumpets. I mean that real babies get themselves born, that their bodies develop in the real wombs of their mothers. I believe in gingivitis and diarrhea.

You speak of 'verifiable facts,' but it's hard to make sense of such a phrase in the light of the assumption that only thought exists. We can roughly identity thought here with signitive intention (empty or unfulfilled or unchecked hypothesis or picture of the world). Then a fulfilled intention is us going and looking at the situation. I see that there are two eggs in the fridge. Color, shape, the cool feeling of them in my hand, the crack sound as I smack them against a cast iron edge.

The instant field of the present is at all times what I call the ‘pure’ experience. It is only virtually or potentially either object or subject as yet. For the time being,it is plain, unqualified actuality, or existence, a simple that.

'Experience' a slightly confusing synonym for [perspectival, care-structured ] being, in other words.