You're assuming that the human will, which is within language (as I am writing now), is a passive will, determined by some configuration of language that is materializing by simple necessity.

I agree that it is somewhat absurd (a bit of a leap of faith) to believe that consciousness came from non-consciousness. You seem to be also saying the opposite, that it is absurd to consider consciousness (subjectivity) begetting the objective (non-consciousness). — ScottVal

Actually what I would say, in terms of existentialism, there is no use for the dualism of subject and object at all. By virtue of the fact that consciousness is always consciousness of something, what would have been a subject (ego) in relation to an object has been reconciled. In other words, instead of a reference of subject relating to object, consciousness has been shown to be, according to this assertion (consciousness is always consciousness of something it is not), fundamentally a relationality, and a connection with the world, as opposed to something behind the scenes experiencing a world that is separate. There is no being behind the appearance. The appearance is an interaction of being, and the 'object of consciousness' is, in a sense, consciousness itself.

I use language. Language does not use me.

lol

Now THAT is funny.

Syphilis attacks the brain in its final stage... And it will kill you.

I guess you have no notion of his solution to nihilism, or Ubermensch?

"God is dead" does not mean that.

God is dead means... That which unified people under a notion of a world-behind-the-scene or in something other than what would be returning to man and working toward what would be the ideal human being with only humanity as a reference, is no longer. The world of religion has turned man into a base man; a herd creature struggling for just a piece of satisfaction amongst one another in terms of absolutism. An absolute truth is no longer. A already set purpose for human life is no longer. The religious motivation views human life fundamentally corrupt... And this does not satisfy us... Religion is dead... It cannot give a meaningful, authentic life. It opposes human life. 'God' is dead in that it opposes human life.

That is said atop premise of a supposed necessity, namely that there must have been something that has given rise to the 'world of phenomena,' which... I might say frankly... Is all there is...
Why must 'the world of phenomena' (the only world) have been given its being as if... it were created?

His medical problems were not related to his thinking. He had an illness that affected his brain, and in his later years he could not express himself coherently so to be understood by others well. It is a coincidence. A terrible one.

Intentionality is simply the understanding that consciousness is always conscious of something. This reconciles the duality of subject and object or being and appearance. Or Descartes' separation.

Oh sorry I can't not quote someone. I can only regurgitate the thoughts of other people, because I have no thoughts of my own...

Being does not 'need' intentionality.
Consciousness is by virtue of intentionality. Consciousness is a sort of being, but is not a being-in-itself as might be an intentional object.

There is nothing that necessitates there being something that does the presupposing. All there is is a presupposing.

Like what

Being is uncreated.

Are you in consideration of a world behind the scenes?

To be in awe at the fact of existence requires an existence in place already... And so one is not really in awe as much as they are captivated by aspects of existence that relate to something desirable.

Good stuff, but the issue I may have with consciousness being primary is that the physical universe came first; a lifeless universe. Then life appeared at some point, yada yada, ultimately my parents appeared, finally I was conceived, my brain developed, my mind developed, and my consciousness developed. So how is it primary? — ScottVal

Does it not seem to be maybe just a bit of a leap of faith to consider that consciousness 'came from' nonconsciousness?

Sartre says being is uncreated. Sartre says the notion of a subjectivity, even a divine subjectivity, begetting the objective is absolutely absurd, for a subjectivity could not have even the representation of an objectivity so to be affected with the will to create it...

Consciousness is primary because it is the "condition of all revelation."

And this is thus reality? Or... Something else?

Is it....

"Truth! Rapturous delusion of a god! What does truth matter to human beings!
And what was the Heraclitean "truth"!
And where has it gone? A vanished dream, wiped from the faces of men, along with other dreams!--It was not the first!

Of all that we with such proud metaphors call "world history" and "truth" and "fame," a heartless demon might have nothing to say but this:

"In some remote corner of the sprawling universe, twinkling among the countless solar systems, there was once a star on which some clever animals invented 'knowledge.' It was the most mendacious minute in world history, but it was only a minute. After nature caught it's breath a little, the star froze, and the clever animals had to die. And it was time, too: for although they boasted of how much they had come to know, in the end they realized they had gotten it all wrong. They died and in dying cursed truth. Such was the species of doubting animal that had invented knowledge."

This would be man's fate were he nothing more than a thinking animal; truth would drive him to despair and annihilation, truth eternally damned to be untruth. All that is proper to man, however, is faith in the attainable truth, in the ever approaching, confidence-inspiring illusion. Does he not in fact live BY constant deception? Doesn't nature conceal virtually everything from him, even what is nearest, for example, his own body, of which he has only a spurious "consciousness"? He is locked up in this consciousness, and nature has thrown away the key. O fateful curiosity of the philosopher, who longs to peer out just once through a crack in the chamber of consciousness--perhaps then he gains an intimation that man rests in the indifference of his ignorance on the greedy, the insatiable, the disgusting, the merciless, the murderous, suspended in dreams on the back of a tiger.

"Let him hang," cries ART. "Wake him up," cries the philosopher, in the pathos of truth. Yet, even as he believes himself to be shaking the sleeper, he himself sinks into a still deeper magical slumber--perhaps then he dreams of "ideas" or of immortality. Art is mightier than knowledge, for IT wants life, and knowledge attains as its ultimate end only--annihilation."

Nietzsche - On the Pathos of Truth
@gurugeorge

I think knowledge is superfluous.

Things other than humans exist. — creativesoul

Consciousness is not a thing.

We love life not because we are used to living but because we are used to loving." Nietzsche

I was just commenting about assertion. ...and a presumption that your own perceptions, experiences, feelings and impressions, and your emotional conclusions from, and reaction to, them, have universal authority about how things are. — Michael Ossipoff

Hmmmm. In relation to a HUMAN EXISTENCE, wouldn't an experience of something 'unadulturated' by language and expression, which strips the individual authenticity of what is down into the simple and general, absolutely have an authority regarding how things are? If I say "My significant-other committed suicide and 'that' made me feel extraordinarily sad" wouldn't that communicate a universal authority about how 'that thing', namely the happening of a member of a relationship committing suicide resulting in the sadness of the other member of the relationship, is?

But these 'other things' are what?... Ahh... Adhering to the epistemology of realism?
And these other things... How do they exist?

Exactly... Knowledge is the real rubbish.

How could a knowledge establish anything other than that premised upon a HUMAN knowledge? Unless, of course, knowledge is based on a divine metaphysic....

If a metaphysics always presupposes an epistemology then an epistemology always presupposes a metaphysics.

Knowledge is at base abstraction. Knowledge boils down to a characterization of what it is to be human, not of what anything else is.

"Never believe anything to be true unless it can be shown to be absolutely false." William Blake said something along the lines of this.
And so, related to knowledge, knowledge is 'asymptotic' to truth.

"Meaning is not ever found in the analysis of a predicate, the kind involving only meanings of the words themselves. A cat is not going to be found in the analysis of what a cat is. This is the case because the meaning of something seems to always relate to the whole of that something, specifically the 'appropriation' of that whole, not the understanding or 'knowledge' of the parts, or the constitution. The whole is so 'greater' than the sum of its parts, which are infinite, metaphorically 'asymptotic' to the whole (the totality, the meaning). Aetiology is thus incapable of founding meaning in any direct way. Meaning seems to be only indirectly disclosed by knowledge."

But aside from Gettier...
If I know that I felt something. Is that knowledge so because I have a justified true belief of it or because I know that I experienced what it is I am referring to?
But do I know that I know what I am referring to?
If knowledge is based on a JTB then this would have to be true by virtue of a JTB... So the justified true belief is that knowledge is based on a justified true belief? This sounds circular.
Furthermore, The knowledge of the justified true belief that knowledge is by virtue of a justified true belief rests upon what? A justified true belief?

Case one implies that the proposition was true not by virtue of a justified true belief, and that he had knowledge of what would be the outcome, but not based on a JTB.

My idea, as you can see, is that consciousness does not really belong to the individual existence of man but to his community or herd nature; that, consequently, it is finely developed only in relation to community and herd utility; and, consequently, that each of us, with the best will to understand ourselves as individually as possible, "to know ourselves," will always only bring to consciousness precisely what is nonindividual in ourselves, what is 'average': that our thoughts themselves are constantly overruled by the character of consciousness--by the genius of the species--dominating them--and translated back into herd perspective. All our actions are at bottom incomparably personal, unique, endlessly individual, there is no doubt; but as soon as we translated them into consciousness, they no longer seem so ... This is genuine phenomenalism and perspectivism, as I understand it: the nature of animal consciousness is such that the world we can be conscious of is only a world of surfaces and signs, a world generalized, made common--that everything becomes flat, thin, relatively, general, a sign, a herd signal; that all coming to consciousness involves a cast and thoroughgoing corruption, falsification, superficialization, and generalization. Heightened consciousness is ultimately a danger, and whoever lives among the most conscious Europeans knows moreover that its a sickness. As you might guess, it is not the opposition of subject and object that concerns me here--i leave that to the epistemologists who have gotten caught in the snares of grammar (and folk metaphysics). It is even less the opposition of "thing in itself" and appearance, for we do not 'know' nearly enough even to be entitled to draw such a distinction. We simply have no organ for knowing, for truth, we know (or believe or imagine) just as much may be useful in the interests of the human herd, the species; and even what is here called utility is in the end only a faith, something imagined, and perhaps precisely the most disasterous stupidity that will one day do us in.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The Gay Science

It as absolutely absurd to think that without consciousness there still exists anything. Consciousness is uncreated. Billions of years is what? Too an abstraction.

"Indeed where would consciousness come from if it did come from something? From the limbo of the unconscious or of the physiological. But if we ask ourselves how this limbo in its turn can exist and where it derives it's existence, we find ourselves faced with the concept of a passive existence; that is, we can no more absolutely understand how this non-conscious given (unconscious or physiological) which does not derives it's existence from itself, can nevertheless perpetuate this existence and find in addition the ability to produce a consciousness. This demonstrates the great favor which the proof a contingentia mundi has enjoyed.

The appearance is not supported by any existent other than itself; it has its own being. The first being which we meet in our ontological inquiry is the being of the appearance. Is it itself an appearance? It seems so at first. The phenomenon is what manifests itself, and being manifests itself to all in some way, since we can speak of it and since we have a certain comprehension of it.

In a particular object one can always distinguish qualities like color, odor, etc. And proceeding from these, one can always determine an essence which they imply, as a sign implies its meaning. The totality "object-essence" makes an organized whole. The essence is not in the object. It is the meaning of the object, the principle of the series of appearances with disclose it. But being is neither one of the object's qualities, capable of being apprehended among others, nor a meaning of an object. The object does not refer to being as a signification; it would be impossible, for example, to define being as a presence SINCE ABSENCE TOO DISCLOSES BEING, since not to be there means still to be. The object does not possess being, and it's existence is not a participation in being, nor any other kind of relation. It is. That is the only way to define its manner of being: the object does not hide being, but neither does it reveal being. The object does not hide it, for it would be futile to try and push aside certain qualities of the existent in order to find the being behind them; being is being of them all equally. The object does not reveal being, for it would be futile to address oneself to the object in order to apprehended its being. The existent is a phenomenon; this means that it designates itself as an organized totality of qualities. It designates itself and not its being. Being is simply the condition of all revelation.

...

... The being of the phenomenon, although coextensive with the phenomenon, can not be subject to the phenomenal condition -- which is to exist only in so far as it reveals itself -- and that consequently it surpasses the knowledge which we have of it and provides the basis for such knowledge.

Jean Paul Sartre Being and Nothingness

The laws of nature have an ontological rather than an temporal priority (as does God). To have ontological priority is to be an actualizing or an informing principle. But such principles must be concurrent with the processes they actualize and inform, or they could not fulfill their dynamic roles. — Dfpolis

And what is this ontological priority of the 'laws of nature?' I assume you are saying that the laws of nature have a primacy over being-in-the-world?
And so you are fundamentally deterministic.
And in bad faith.

And if nothing was there to acknowledge this abstraction of 'rock' it would too still exist?
Absurd

An image is created by the mind...
So the body creates the world.
So you espouse fatalism?

"The illusion of worlds behind the scenes..."

And what of the Gettier problems?
JTB is not infallible.

I am aware of Russel's distinction. But my own infinite regress in my own analaysis of this... I cannot be sure it is the result of a lack of a distinction. It just seems reductionistic to distinguish between two forms of knowledge which are at base doing the same thing by different means, which seems to me to be what 'knowledge' does in general. I could just as easily analyze knowledge in terms of what is a priori or a posteriori, and fragment the question further, and lack a unified characterization of knowledge, and furthermore of consciousness... For is consciousness not a knowledge of being conscious?

What constitutes a knowledge of something? What is that which is known The Most? It would be feelings, experiences, correct? And so if the superlative demonstration of a known consists in its complete inability of being represented by words... What is knowledge? A question of this knowledge could only relate to knowledge by description; however, knowledge by description relates fundamentally to knowledge by acquaintance.

The act of presupposing does not necessitate an I am. This is the Cartesian illusion.
It is so because it does not incorportate intentionality, and just dissolves knowledge into either idealism or realism, which I refuse to accept.

Is thought interchangeable with expression? Thought is itself an expression? Or is thought prior to expression?
It seems thought can be a sort of expression of existence, but it is not limited to this. Thought is at base a relation, not an expression.
And so if thought is at primordially a relation and not an expression, it seems that its 'operation' does not necessitate it being a language.
Language is, furthermore, communicability. Thought is not tied to being communicable. I would say 99% of 'thought' is completely incapable of being communicated. Thought is a relationality.
And therefore there is no fundamental contingency between thought and language, only in terms of expression.

@ChatteringMonkey Reflection creates representations of experience. Nietzsche has distinguished between emotion and thought, but he has called thoughts the 'shadows' of emotions. They, in a sense, represent emotions, but they cannot adequately be said to be mere representations. Does a shadow 'represent' a figure? A shadow is a figure displayed atop certain determinants, and these determinants create a distinctly different figure... The figure would be the emotion, and the thought would be the shadow.
Consciousness is to be aware that one is conscious. To be conscious implies certain fundamental ties; intentionality--consciousness is always consciousness of something. It would not be consciousness that is conscious of an emotion... It would be being conscious of being consciousness (of) an emotion. Consciousness is always consciousness of something, and therefore the emotion is not separate from that consciousness. It is that consciousness. There is not a mysterious ego behind the scenes that experiences everything and is categorizing it as it goes. It is its experiences, and such a categorization comes subsequently, in relation to what is manageable and capable of being related. Thought is not the Creator of phenomena. It is the relationality of phenomena. Emotions are proximal to consciousness. Emotions constitute our facticity... Much different than thought.
Emotions, formless and impoverished in their concepts seem to be the current of the ocean that would be the interconnectivity of volition fragmented, serving the many 'forces' of emotions that 'provide' or sustain thoughts, which are at base simplified amalgamations of obscure happenings. Emotions seem to be a sort of foundation for the concatenation of thought.
@Christoffer

I am essentially between idealism and realism, having premised my epistemology upon intentionality; the fact that consciousness is always consciousness of something, which reconciles the split between idealism and realism, which both posit the knower as separate from any object of knowledge. The question is now, for me, a question of knowledge itself; relating to the authenticity of knowledge--how one can be sure that they know anything at all. I have myself witnessed in analysis the infinite regress the result of not distinguishing between knowledge by description and knowledge by acquaintance; however, I am uncertain whether or not this distinction is itself necessary to understand knowledge. I have reached conclusions myself, but I am trying to take it further. The inseparabilility that is the result of intentionality, which would be the knower versus the known, seems to me to render knowledge an interaction of being-in-the-world and a relationship as opposed to a pure apprehension of something separate. Regardless, another question has materialized for me...
If the realist valuation of epistemology is accurate... How could the true object be at all if all that is apprehended is the perception or conception of it? Would this not suffice to represent that truth?

It is perhaps hard, but thought is apart from language. If thought is defined as activity of consciousness then not all thought is language. If one thinks of past memories or of the future, one often does not do so with language solely. Perhaps language is accompanied, but fantasies and images constitute much of thought, and furthermore these images and fantasies inspire language. Language is inspired. And the thought is the impetus of the inspiration.

So this epistemology is one of realism?

Does not an object exist for me? How can it be said to exist in itself as a chair apart from the intentionality that designates 'it' as chair, apart from it falling into the nothingness that would be the undifferentiated everything?