What I want to say is that the depressive state has to be met on its own terms. — csalisbury

I don't know how good the legal drugs work these days, but my unprofessional hunch would be that drugs are maybe necessary. At least for me the mood was just so thick and physical that it was all going on below ideology, even if an icy logic of suicide was a symptom. Indeed, I'd often get a little risky with substances in such states. While this isn't ideal, it often helped. One good party could wake up the will to the live. I guess I needed the others to connect to just as much, though. It's just that I needed the drugs to open me up again to what I already had in the others perhaps. I still haven't tried ecstasy, but I believe that was developed for therapy. To me that makes sense: jumpstart the will to live.

And I like the clear-eyed appreciation of how that state works. I've succumbed, in the past, to the feeling that I'd overcome once and for all that state, and that I'd never think in that way again. — csalisbury

Same here. I've escaped for years at a time to be sucked back in to the whirlpool. It's been almost a year since the last bout. I had a variety of pills on hand to self-medicate. I did some very real and very gloomy writing. I still have it but haven't bothered to re-read it. I was cleaning out a dead woman's house, dealing with ashes of family (in-laws) literally and figuratively. And I was also temporarily unsure of who I wanted to be in the world. And there was (as there often is in such cases) a dream of purity (monk-like simplicity) that plays a role. Even marriage seemed like too much entanglement, even a good one. The will to purity is akin to the will to death, in my experience. Only the silence of the grave is pure.

Anyway, I worked through this last bout in just a few weeks thankfully. I remember worse cases lasting for maybe 2 months. I'd wake up thinking about suicide. Yet I'd keep my job and relationship intact. It was all or nothing. And I've always been too proud or stupid or cynical in such modes to seek any professional help. I insisted on interpreting my agony in terms of the universal human condition which I was heroically facing. And I was seemingly willing to die to maintain this fiction (?).

On the one hand, I think that's sure progress. Like - being contemptuous of contempt for all things gentle is a better way of navigating the world than being contemptuous of all things gentle.

But, at the same time, that same contempt-muscle is being flexed and strengthened. — csalisbury

You make an interesting point. I must confess that I feel repulsed by men who aren't 'gentleman' (in the grocery store for instance.) I remember painfully being less of a 'gentleman' myself. The non-gentleman over-projects suspicion and the willingness to make war (a cat with its tail puffed out.) And the non-gentleman is the drunk person who exaggerates the interest that strangers might have their interruption. I guess in some ways I am just my own asshole father (who's much gentler these days anyway) responding to different sins. Because I can see the vulnerability behind the aggressiveness, and I do feel superior to it and embarrassed by it (along with some sense of danger), even as or because I remember expressing myself more in that way. I've convinced myself that I am one of the beautiful people (ignoring bad moods), and there's a cruelty in that. I can face up to it and pay myself on the back for a beautiful facing up to it, etc. I am wise because I'm a sinner and fool and a sinner and a fool for believing myself wise and beautiful. Messy stuff.

"Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say
What was this forest savage, rough, and stern,
Which in the very thought renews the fear." — csalisbury

Great quote. It's as hard as describing being in love to a kid. The heights and depths can only be words from the outside.

Seems melodramatic until you know what he's talking about. Which, yet another poet said better

"even a proverb is no proverb to you until your life has illustrated it." — csalisbury

This is a great theme. Many is the time when I 'understood' something that I had read. My mind had absorbed the words, but then those words would take on a living meaning, sometimes years later. 'That's what he was talking about!'

I can especially relate to the feeling of having to 'protect others' from yourself and your ideas. — csalisbury

Yes. And I've more or less always identified with being some kind of writer. I find myself or present myself in words first and foremost. Father knows best. 'He thinks he's an old soul.' So the experience of being damned up, of only having poison for truth, was the anti-dream. Naturally my mind would present to me an ice-cold logic of suicide. Dostoevskian grins and grimaces. Looking back on it, I can enjoy in some sense my passage through that darkness. I can theoretically listen from a darker place, having endured the cruel laughter of the gods. All of this somewhat candifies the experience. If I am ever thrown back into that state, I will want to vomit at the idea that something could be made of it.

This is verrry cheesy. BUT one of my most cherished memories is at a xmas party, with a group of friends - linked arms, heads bowed down, eyes closed, gently swaying, singing 'bridge over troubled water' together in unison. That was probably the closest I've been to a shared religious experience. Or at least a certain type of shared religious experience. The experience of it welled up and overcame the sappiness I would've been put-off by were the critical observer part of me more in control. — csalisbury

I relate. There's something so naked about singing and dancing together. The soul as a vulnerable ecstatic and gentle thing comes out. And anyone with a trouble childhood is probably going to feel afraid and tempted to repeat (as in my case) the mockery of my father of all such softness ad enthusiasm. (Now I maybe have turned that mockery on itself, weaponized that contempt against the contempt for all things gentle. )

Yes exactly. The 'hiding' of 'sin' creates this weird symmetrical structure. The more I hide my indiscretions from myself and others, the more I suspect others of harboring equally unforgivable abuses. And If I act shallowly and falsely, maintaining an aura of innocence - then, at the same time, I'm soliciting the other person to play along. And when they play along, its easy to see them as shallow and false. — csalisbury

This goes to the heart of worldliness for me. Let's say that a person has come to terms in a certain way with human nature. They know their own evil (give it free play) in their imaginations. Yes, they wince at sins that they actually committed in the past, but perhaps they are behaving pretty well these days because they give their evil a life in their imagination. 'Wise as a serpent, gentle as a dove.'

I have the sense of many would reject this idea and instead feel that they must have clean minds. Sanity as sanitation. But if most people insist on having and projecting clean minds, then this kind of self-knowledge has to hide itself. People are trapped inside themselves, everyone afraid to confess that their interiors don't match exterior images of impossible/perfect purity.

I think this is where friendship as a kind of sacred sharing of secrets comes in. Profound friends stand in some secret place outside all the lying and faking. This structure is expanded in subcultures that really do violate norms.

Continuing the thought of the previous posts, certain negative or critical thinkers can be understood to be continuing the Enlightenment even as they criticize it. We can think of the substitution of master words, one used to pry the previous one loose which itself becomes confining. A 'shallow' humanism is replaced with some kind of proximity to Being. What is highest in man is not that he is lord of this world but rather his responding to the call of Being, etc. Whatever is cursed as anthropomorphic is only cursed in the name of a higher anthropomorphism. The end of man is the transcendence of man, one might say. Naturally, then, one humanism displaces its preceding humanism as an insufficiently radical thinking of the human.

Is information lost when going from the fourth dimension to the third dimension? — Wallows

Not necessarily. Of course it depends on how you metaphysically interpret Cantor.

In 1878, Cantor submitted another paper to Crelle's Journal, in which he defined precisely the concept of a 1-to-1 correspondence and introduced the notion of "power" (a term he took from Jakob Steiner) or "equivalence" of sets: two sets are equivalent (have the same power) if there exists a 1-to-1 correspondence between them. Cantor defined countable sets (or denumerable sets) as sets which can be put into a 1-to-1 correspondence with the natural numbers, and proved that the rational numbers are denumerable. He also proved that n-dimensional Euclidean space Rn has the same power as the real numbers R, as does a countably infinite product of copies of R. — Wiki

Not categorize, per se, but to say what it's supposed to be physically as something public. — Terrapin Station

For me this identification of the public and the physical is problematic. When I drive, I stop at red octagons inscribed STOP. The meaning of a stop sign is no small point, either. It makes driving relatively safe. Another culture might use yellow diamonds for a stop sign and get approximately the same result. So it can't be about the frequency of red light. Similarly the words and letters we use for the idea of stopping are contingent. What matters is that we can tell the difference between an arbitrary sign for going and another for stopping. Meaning seems to evade our typical measurement devices.

I think this makes a case that meaning can't be reduced to the physical, along with a case for the publicity of meaning. We have instituted relatively safe driving patterns with the help of such arbitrary signs. Meaning matters. It acts in the world as a public phenomenon. It works because it is public.

I've just recently read 'The Ends of Man,' an essay in Margins about humanism and metaphysics and it's associated 'we.' Derrida jokes about whether this we has ever left the church.

IMV, humanism is more or less the thing itself. What is the end or purpose of being human? For Hegel and Heidegger, the human was not understood in its transcendent majesty. Heidegger's distancing himself from humanism was just a distancing from an insufficiently radical humanism, an insufficiently radical conception of the human.

Pure meaning, utterly distinct from its 'body,' is like God utterly distinct from the world. As God descends into the world, meaning descends into the sign and its entanglement in time and matter. And a similar movement includes man 'reeling in' his projection of his own divine essence into some beyond. Heaven becomes a classless society down here, or a union of egoists, or a society of creative individuals of where love is pretty much the only law and there is no sharp line between poetry and science, etc.

Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man’s inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! “Have courage to use your own reason!”- that is the motto of enlightenment. — Kant

In other words, the kingdom of God is within you as universal reason. The basic thrust of philosophy seems to be a wrenching free of the human from a trans-human authority. On the other hand, this is manged in terms of a universal or species-wide 'human essence' which is not personal or idiosyncratic.

An ironic rejection of humanism at first seems possible along these lines:

Now if we stop at these absolutely empty forms which originate from the absoluteness of the abstract ego, nothing is treated in and for itself and as valuable in itself, but only as produced by the subjectivity of the ego. But in that case the ego can remain lord and master of everything, and in no sphere of morals, law, things human and divine, profane and sacred, is there anything that would not first have to be laid down by the ego, and that therefore could not equally well be destroyed by it. Consequently everything genuinely and independently real becomes only a show, not true and genuine on its own account or through itself, but a mere appearance due to the ego in whose power and caprice and at whose free disposal it remains. To admit or cancel it depends wholly on the pleasure of the ego, already absolute in itself simply as ego. — Hegel

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ae/introduction.htm#s7-3

Of course this ego, the 'unique,' is a fiction. It is a repeatable meaning act that can be approximately shared. One can even dream of a utopian 'union of egoists.' Every one take joy in the mutual recognition of radical freedom --a freedom however that is no longer so radical in that it recognizes the freedom of the other. In short, this isn't really anti-humanism, or it could only be so as a disgusting kind of thuggishness. It's high form of humanism if one includes its ellipsis. Stirner expanded the paragraph above into a book and published it with what only makes sense as an evangelical intention. The 'unique' was a repeatable meaning act, even if it is supposed to point beyond or beneath all concepts.

If the ego remains at this standpoint, everything appears to it as null and vain, except its own subjectivity which therefore becomes hollow and empty and itself mere vanity.[53] But, on the other hand, the ego may, contrariwise, fail to find satisfaction in this self-enjoyment and instead become inadequate to itself, so that it now feels a craving for the solid and the substantial, for specific and essential interests. Out of this comes misfortune, and the contradiction that, on the one hand, the subject does want to penetrate into truth and longs for objectivity, but, on the other hand, cannot renounce his isolation and withdrawal into himself or tear himself free from this unsatisfied abstract inwardness. — Hegel

In short, assuming that one through the ideology of the pure ego comes to 'full self-possession,' this possessed self only has its worth in the first place (even for itself) in terms of the We. 'Some are born posthumously.' A outermost rebel dreams of his proper readers. This 'we' may be a community not yet available, a virtual community. One sacred We is rejected in terms of another.

But along with the overall rejection of religious philosophy by Enlightenment philosophers, much of that traditional understanding went with it. I know that I am going to be criticized for saying it, that it's sentimental or idealised or whatever, but I really think that is what happened. — Wayfarer

I agree. Natural science is effective by focusing on a certain aspect of experience as it ignores others. Before long there is a tendency to think that meaning itself is unreal (!?). An 'anti-Hegelian' scientism repeats the reality of the rational by denying the reality of anything that doesn't fit into its un-criticized and narrow notion of rationality. What I call scientism ignores the tension in itself between Baconian utilitarian pragmatism and its high-flown rhetoric of about grasping the objective real without distortion. This high-flown rhetoric is what remains of its disavowed spirituality (Deism?)

The whole intellectual project was about discovering the 'logos' of things - from whence all of today's disciplines ending in -logy arose, as well as 'logic' itself. 'Reason' and 'rationality' originated with such discoveries as the Pythagorean ratios and harmonics. In that context, everything point back, or up, to the origin or source (the One, in later Platonism). — Wayfarer

I agree. You know I love Hegel, and he in Werner Marx's view was a logos philosopher. His genius was addressing the genesis of the logos. The One or Being divides itself in order to know and recover itself in its fullness, a fullness that is only achieved by division. The acorn becomes the oak. The German idealists were thinkers of the One, but some of them stopped at an intuition of unity and 'the night in which all cows are black.' Along the same lines, some of them insisted that the 'absolute' was only grasped by feeling and not by 'the labor of the concept.' Personally I'm more open minded about grasping the absolute by feeling, while also respecting the labor of the concept. Anyway, Hegel (as I'm sure you know) was a thinker of telos. It is the nature of the One to blossom into a rich self-knowing which is also a self-creation. 'Spirit' is its own product. Theology is God, which it recognizes at the moment of its completion, one might say. Others might say that the whole story is a dazzling fiction. It speaks to me, but I understand the suspicion or disinterest of others (Hegel mostly won't help one pay the rent, etc.)

Spirit must know itself, externalize itself, have itself as object, must know itself in such a way as to exhaust its own possibilities in becoming totally object to itself...The goal of spirit is, if we may employ the expression, to comprehend itself, to remain no longer hidden to itself. The road to this is its development, and the series of developments form the levels of its development.
...
Now, the history of philosophy is precisely that and nothing else. In philosophy as such, in the present, most recent philosophy, is contained all that the work of millennia has produced; it is the result of all that has preceded it. And the same development of Spirit, looked at historically, is the history of philosophy. It is the history of all the developments which Spirit has undergone, a presentation of its moments or stages as they follow one another in time. Philosophy presents the development of thought as it is in and for itself, without addition; the history of philosophy is this development in time. Consequently the history of philosophy is identical with the system of philosophy. — Hegel

I don't take this as the final word, but the idea of system as history or history as system really speaks to me.

The problem is that if you say that meaning is public, then what, exactly, would you be saying it is ontologically? — Terrapin Station

I think that's a great question. I'd say we have a experience/phenomenon of partially public meaning and that it's just not easy to fit in to traditional philosophical projects. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm thinking your question is about how to categorize the being of meaning. We could only do so via meaningful signs. You also use the word 'exactly,' and that's another great issue. Granting that meaning is partially shared, is it ever shared exactly? Is any 'meaning act' ever the perfect repetition of another? If it is not, then any categorization of meaning is itself necessarily inexact. Basically we are somewhere between the exaggerated notion that a text has just any kind of meaning and an equally exaggerated notion that there is some exact/true meaning of a text (perhaps relying on the idea that the speaking subject is 'transparent' for himself, understands exactly what his own signs mean.).

*This connects to Speech and Phenomena. In some ways the dream of metaphysics can be reduced to an isolated and yet universal/transcendental mind having the meaning of its signs perfectly and exactly present for itself.

The tension seems to be between power-as-knowledge and a warm and fuzzy feeling directed at the idea of gazing on nature without any kind of subjective distortion. This perception-without-distortion is valued for its own sake, which I'd say conceals the religious charge in scientism (the project of 'incarnating' Rationality both personally and as a community, which is more humanism, which itself is the critical purification of Christianity.)

In other words, the gap between scientism and religion is itself a religious concept. A power-as-knowledge conception leads pretty quickly to the effectiveness of religion itself as one more technology. Indeed, scientism itself (which is not science but a cheerleading of science as the replacement of both philosophy and religion) imposes itself as a social technology which hardly differs from religion structurally. If 'God' was always a 'fantasy,' then so is 'perfect rationality.' It's the actions and more concrete thoughts that have these 'fictions' as their center that shape the world.

Science was used to built your computers. — VoidDetector

I agree, and I think you are touching on the essence here. 'Rationality' is ultimately identified with utility and power in this appeal to technology. 'Knowledge is power' ultimately leads to 'power is knowledge.' The true ground of scientific authority (one might say) is white-washed with an ultimately religious talk about some kind of rationality apart from technical power. Science is the 'living God' because it actually performs miracles. In some sense, scientism just refers us to the correct and actual miracles, toward the living 'God' of man the engineer. As I mentioned before, scientism tends to repeat religious motifs.

Then Elijah said to them, “I am the only one of the LORD’s prophets left, but Baal has four hundred and fifty prophets. 23 Get two bulls for us. Let Baal’s prophets choose one for themselves, and let them cut it into pieces and put it on the wood but not set fire to it. I will prepare the other bull and put it on the wood but not set fire to it. 24 Then you call on the name of your god, and I will call on the name of the LORD. The god who answers by fire—he is God.” Then all the people said, “What you say is good.” 25 Elijah said to the prophets of Baal, “Choose one of the bulls and prepare it first, since there are so many of you. Call on the name of your god, but do not light the fire.” 26 So they took the bull given them and prepared it. Then they called on the name of Baal from morning till noon. “Baal, answer us!” they shouted. But there was no response; no one answered. And they danced around the altar they had made. 27 At noon Elijah began to taunt them. “Shout louder!” he said. “Surely he is a god! Perhaps he is deep in thought, or busy, or traveling. Maybe he is sleeping and must be awakened.” — 1st Kings

https://www.biblestudytools.com/1-kings/18.html

When Elija calls on his living God, the fire comes down as requested. And of course he has all the false prophets gathered up and slaughtered as superstitious corrupters of the body politic.

What for me is interesting here is that scientism ends up looking like its own stereotype of postmodernism, its bogeyman to the left. It seems to need a kind of religiously understood 'pure' rationality even as it leans on technology for its perceived dominance over a philosophy that still has the audacity to question its metaphysical presuppositions. Scientism can retreat from its 'religious' investment in pure rationality into something like post-philosophical prudence. It can then take the shape of a world-saving political program that understands power as truth. In this case can it explain its own concern with saving the world? Perhaps in terms of a social instinct.

A last point is that technology-as-truth just opens up the 'truth' in religion all over again. Religion can easily be framed as a social technology. Once science becomes instrumentalism, there's no clear line between technologies that work. A system of beliefs and rituals can be true in its effectiveness. If science builds cellphones, then religion builds empires (with the help of science, just as science has its ideological sources in religion).

Meaning and coherence are subjective. — Terrapin Station

This is that 'isolated ego' you asked me about in the other thread. The 'subject' alone with its meaning. Let's work with this view. Then the isolated subject can interpret marks and noises and approximately repeat the meaning acts of other isolated subjects, therefore generating an 'illusion' of approximately public approximate meaning. Fair enough.

For me what's strange is a naive realism (which I like in many ways) combined with an insistence on the subject cut off from direct public meaning. I see the tree, but I don't hear the other. The other spits out meaningless (but potentially meaningful) noises that I have to 'bring to life' with a 'meaning act.' And yet the tree doesn't send meaningless photons that have to be reconstituted by the subject.

All these positions are defensible, but I like the spirit of naive realism and connect it to communication as well (and that means calling meaning and coherence subjective becomes problematic.) The gap between the subject and the thing-in-itself is not unlike the gap between subjects, a kind of theoretical assumption that ignores our primary experience of the world in order to obsess over absolute certainty, etc.

Going back to being skeptical of this state-of-affairs being a "view", I have to ask, "why does it appear like a "view""? What I mean is, why is there depth, not just in vision, but in our auditory, tactile, gustatory and olfactory symbols? That may be the one thing that they all share in common because if not for that, we could have good reason to be skeptical of our sensations being about a external world. Each sense supplies very different symbols. The fact that I can see coffee and feel coffee at the same time, isn't as good as being able to see them and feel them in the same location as well. — Harry Hindu

These are great points and questions. An imperfect answer would be that when we are just gliding along pre-theoretically through life the notion of the external world never comes up. I am 'in' the world which is not an object for theory. I drive home for work, at one with the driving. I know that other drivers are in the same world with me. They can see the objects I see (if they are paying attention.) Sharing a world full of objects with others and a language with others is something like a foundation that obscures itself. A critic of this automatic view might talk of presupposing the external. I 'unconsciously' presuppose the reality of the everyday world. But talk of presuppositions arguably just projects a theoretical gaze that just isn't there, covering up the phenomenon of being-in-the-world.

The synchronization of our senses does seem to play a huge role in this. When we see an object, we expect that we can touch it too (though we learn that things like shadows break the general rule.)

we use our cultural language (those specific visual and auditory symbols) to communicate an explanation. — Harry Hindu

I agree, but you didn't go into how you understand explanation. What is an explanation?

but those scribbles and sounds still need to refer to something to mean something other than just being visual scribbles and sounds — Harry Hindu

I agree. I think being-in-a-world-with-others is something like a basic structure of experience. I see an lamp on my desk as see-able also by others and as something I can switch on for light. I expect others (within my community) to also grasp it immediately as something one can switch on for light and as something that I can see. I grasp the word 'lamp' as grasping such things in a vagueness that covers many individual lamps. So we start from somewhere like this, understanding 'too much.' And then an atomic reconstruction needs to forget this complex unity of self, others, and world through language in order to build it all back up.

the sense of seeking an unconditional truth - understanding this one thing, all things are understood. Explanation was finding the reason for everything. — Wayfarer

I understand why one would say 'if you understand anything completely, then you understand everything.' It captures that the nature of things consists largely of actual and possible relationships with other things. Things in isolation are in some sense an abstraction.

Is explanation just the projection of necessary relationships? Or does passion come into it? A sense of recognition and familiarity? One can use the word in various ways, but I'd say that metaphors the frame the situation in terms of motive and purpose have their value.

When you think of "democracy" what fills your mind? What form does "democracy" take in your mind other than just the scribbles on the screen? How do you know that you're thinking of "democracy"? It requires an awareness of some visualization of maybe politicians vying for your vote, or citizens voting. Our minds cross-reference these visual or auditory impressions with other sensory impressions. "Warmth" refers to some tactile sensation. "Green eggs and ham" refer to a visual of eggs and ham that are colored green with maybe even an imagined smell or taste. — Harry Hindu

This reminds me of Derrida's point taken to the extreme. I largely agree. I'm interested in the 'finite resolution' of thought in the lifestream. Meaning is 'dirtied' by sensation, history, image, metaphor. 'Pure' meaning (the ideal essence of democracy in perfect clarity) does indeed look like a fiction. But I can't go the other way and neglect what is 'ideal' in the voice and text altogether.

I think we are emphasizing different aspects of the same situation. I'm focusing on the internal evolution of the imperfectly ideal and sensation-soaked concept system. You are starting more from the stuff of the world.

That's not really how I see it. I see explanations (both right and wrong ones) as part of that causal substratum I talked about. They are just new arrangements resulting from interactions of input (sensory data) and our built-in software (genetic and life history). Explanations would be the output, no different than any output a computer produces (processed information). Explanations are causes themselves and produce effects. Everything is a process of causation (information/meaning). — Harry Hindu

Fair enough. How do you understand explanation? For me it's the postulation of necessary relationships. It's a grid thrown over experience. If you see this, then expect that (or project 'that' back on the past.) To get this, do that. Entities in relationship. I like this project/understanding of explanation. Clarifying/installing the causal nexus is what it looks like to me.

But I'd add that we have genesis and not just structure. The 'mind' creates new entities. Since the mind is creative, it is never finished knowing itself. It is its own product in some sense. The mind determines the nature of mind according to the memory of its own products. Meaning accumulates. The conversation becomes more complex and involves the introduction of explanatory entities that themselves end up asking for explanation. Reality swells and reflects on itself, at least if we grant the reality of ideas as deserving of explanation. Now we can box all of this up with the word 'mind' and still get some work done. I see that. This doesn't prevent our imposition of causal relationships.

fundamental units. — Harry Hindu

I am clarifying for myself that I don't object to the atomistic project. Analysis is good. I would just balance it out with a further clarification of what is already there. If we are going to explain reality (including what is called mind or reason) in terms of building blocks, then we also have to really look into the nature of reason. (Do we betray it when we only scan it for atoms to rip out of context?) Otherwise we have something like an un-opened box at the heart of our explanation. We We explain 'mind' (which includes our own ability to do) without having clarified its nature. Our attempts to explain reality add to reality and in that sense oppose themselves. (This still doesn't cancel the value of an atomistic/analytic approach.)


***
A little more on my understanding of Heidegger that might add this issue. Our pre-theoretical experience of the world is largely in terms of objects that we can just grab and use. We as the subject aren't present to ourselves much of the time. Instead we just 'are' grabbing and using. From this perspective, pure mind as opposed to pure object is a theoretical postulation. When we switch to the theoretical mode we gaze on the objects dispassionately (or of value only in the construction of generalizations.) And we are also highly conscious of the subject as we scan our own ideas for coherence. So the theoretical mode only reinforces its founding assumptions, in some sense --maybe trapping us in problems or at least trapping us in a reduced set of approaches to these problems.

And put together into completely new configurations (imagination). This is another reason to think of sensory impressions as fundamental units. — Harry Hindu

I can at least grant that they are well-chosen atoms for certain purposes. I very much consider sensation to be fundamental. The world is not just ideas, not just meaning. It is very much sensation and emotion too. 'Being' or that which is seems to be or include (roughly, as a start) concept, sensation, and emotion. Or rather we can try to construct an external world from these subjective concepts if we choose. It's a path among others. The 'external world' and 'concept' are themselves concepts, which complicates things. Is it even correct to assume that concept is subjective or only subjective?

Yes, and eventually realize that it may even be presumptuous to call this state-of-affairs a "view" where one is "seeing" brown surfaces. What the f*** is this state-of-affairs that is going on?! — Harry Hindu

Indeed. His word is not the last word. He does increase the complexity of the situation. If sense-data remain appealing as atoms, we at least gain a new distance from them by recognizing them as a meaning act of the theoretical gaze.

Coffee is composed of visual (black vs. w/ cream), tactile (warm liquid or iced), auditory (the sound of the coffee dripping), olfactory and gustatory units. — Harry Hindu

I think this is a nice disassembly of coffee. In some ways we are trying to undo the mind's automatic unification of the coffee and the entire living world in which it fits. Heidegger is great when he brings the pre-theoretical world to theoretical consciousness, but he doesn't thereby cancel this project of disassembling to reassemble. In that lecture he associated transcendental idealism with this project, if memory serves. The lifeworld can be deconstructed, examined by reason, and put back together (if possible) to test our understanding of the pieces and the way they fit together.

These larger things seem to "emerge" from the interactions of smaller processes if you think from "bottom to top". In order to try to get a more objective understanding of it, we'd need to think of ourselves as not having a size relative to other things. That seems difficult - maybe something we just can't grasp because having a size relative to other things fixes our subjective size-relation perception of the world and we can't escape that view of the world — Harry Hindu

I like this and think you make a good point. This also points back to the body as the bridge between 'mind' and 'matter' as poles of a continuum (which is only one way among others to try to frame our situation.)

I agree with your explanation of meaning. I consider meaning and information the same thing and the relationship between causes and their effects. Effects carry information about their causes. Effects mean their causes. I like to use Steven Pinker's tree rings example. Tree rings (the effect) are the result of how the tree grows throughout the year (the cause). The tree rings mean, or carry information about, the cause, which is why you can get the age of the tree by the number of rings it has. — Harry Hindu

I like this. It's less linguistic than my approach, but that might even be good in that it blends 'mind' and 'matter' more successfully, or points further toward the matter pole.

This seems like how I keep saying that the mind, including it's misperceptions, illusions and delusions, are real because they are part of reality as much as everything else. Galaxies and illusions should be part of the same substratum. — Harry Hindu

I agree. In one sense there is nothing that isn't real. Of course people use 'real' sometimes for the physical or genuine, etc. I understand that use. But philosophy does seem to be the mission to conceptually unify and clarify experience, which means it can't ignore illusions (concepts, meanings). It has to account for its own possibility and recognize itself as perhaps even a primary entity. (Another approach thinks of thinking as radically isolated from the 'object,' not seeing that its own thinking is perhaps the essence of the 'object' it supposes itself unable to touch directly. An absolute gap is assumed and the absolute knowledge of the impossibility of absolute knowledge is produced from this assumption.)

All of our ideas, imaginings, beliefs and knowledge are composed of sensory impressions. The smallest unit I can think about is a sensory impression. — Harry Hindu

In my view, this approach has quietly slipped into the theoretical mode without noticing it. Our everyday experience is a moving around in a world of objects and persons instantly grasped as such. Similarly we live in language (in meaning) in a kind of easy and automatic way. Heidegger is great on this issue. In one of his early breakthrough lectures, he uses the lecture room as an example in a powerful way.

Heidegger takes the path of repudiating the primacy of the theoretical attitude. For him, we are never in the position of experiencing the sensedata of the Anglo-Saxon tradition.

According to this view, all perceptual experience involves awareness of an appearance, regardless of whether it is an experience of a physical object. Moreover, all our knowledge of the external world is said to be based upon our beliefs concerning the sense-data that we experience. For Heidegger, in contrast, the theoretical attitude is secondary, being predicated on the existence of a preconceptual understanding that is the basis on which we conduct our day-to-day life. We do not see sense-data, what we see – at least as students and lecturers – are, for example, chairs, desks, windows. There is no problem of the external world because we are always already in that world.

He gives the example of the lectern from which he is speaking. He doesn’t see brown surfaces, arranged in such and such a way, from which he infers the existence of a lectern; what he sees is the lectern ‘in one fell swoop’ as either too high or too low, as convenient to his purpose or not. He sees it as already something meaningful... For the young Heidegger and his audience it is simply part of the environment (Umwelt) in which they live, it has the character of a world (Welt). Further, in a neologism which is to become characteristic of his manner, he turns the noun into a verb – ‘es weltet’ – that is, ‘it worlds.’ — link

https://philosophynow.org/issues/32/Towards_the_Definition_of_Philosophy_by_Martin_Heidegger

This doesn't make sensedata a useless or absurd concept, but it does reveal the idea of such data to be a theoretical tool or hypothesis. Heidegger acknowledges in the lecture that one can indeed switch into the theoretical mode and de-world an object. He can learn to see the lectern as brown surfaces. IMV, I understand the appeal of sense-data as building blocks, but I think this neglects the significance of significance itself.

I embrace the goal of being reasonable, being rational. What does it mean to embrace this goal? What comes to my mind is something like the attempt to 'incarnate' universal reason. That reason is universal and binding for all suggests that it is inherently social. It is the name of an authority and a value, among other things, it seems. So being reasonable seems like an attempt to meet others 'in' reason and the revelations of reason.

Is this not the emotional charge of the idea of science? IMV, the OP clearly demonstrates a religious feeling toward the word 'science.' I read the anti-theism as a form of iconoclasm. Since scientific rationality is the true 'god' (a distributed 'holy ghost'), traditional theism is an enemy faith that apparently denies or resists the universality or incarnation of reason. 'God' is understood as a hidden entity subverting the mastery of reason as an alien, unjustified authority. But 'godless' man-as-rational-community who has come to full self-possession only grants authority through reason. The unreasonable is unreal.

===
Induction is as automatic as digestion. Patterns are experienced and projected on the future. Yesterday's 'how' shall be tomorrow's, a faith in our blood invisible to logic. Is science a system of concepts, algorithms, and a thin philosophy that only concepts and algorithms that lead to repeatable, witness-independent results are to count? What can 'god' be for science if not some concept associated with algorithms and repeatable, public results? Is this then not the god of the science-as-philosophy party? And what are the results that really count? Are these not finally feats of technology, overwhelming doubts about the philosophy of science in utility and as superior weapon? Science seduces with convenient and amusing gadgets and threatens with weapons that cannot be defended against by the pre-scientific. I am myself seduced and threatened by science, not against it just because I try to see its foundation. Is it the result of an embodied dialectic, where desire and fear are primary?

But is there not also along with the seduction of convenience and spectacle the old religious seduction? If only the 'superstitious' and the other philosophers who understand reason differently will see 'my' light which is the true light, I can tell the truth about reason. I can finally decide the real in the name of reason, creating the real with my voice (not I, but universal reason through me.) In the beginning was the (rational-scientific) word. But am I happy without the recognition by others of the reason that speaks through me? No. (Or why do I appear here?) So I am directed outward toward the recognition of 'my' reason by a reason also outside me. Can science address such things and replace philosophy, a philosophy that might be eerily adjacent to religion?

For starters, it would satisfy me just that we question whether a search for answers (regarding the largest of questions) should automatically be assumed to be the best way to proceed. — Jake

I relate to that. Illuminate the issue! Use a torch to show the the darkness (darkness as possibility?) Some assume thinking is about the destruction of questions. But what if the cutting edge of reason is in the asking? In the annihilation of answers with question marks?

Yes, you get it. If reason is assumed to be a "one true way" in every circumstance it's on the edge of becoming a kind of religion. — Jake

Indeed. And especially if one stops at the emotionally charged word 'reason.' Is reason ever done reasoning about the nature of reason? 'Reason is one and universal.' Is reason one and universal? This is what we need of reason to make sense of our imposing visions of the real on one another. Is reason not already divine or appealed to as a divinity then? Reason determines the real, makes it determinate, brings it consciousness without distortion. That seems to be the idea. Is this why 'the real is rational and the rational is real'?

The name for 'that which is binding' (abstract authority) changes, but perhaps the appeal to that which binds (behind its changing names) is constant. Aren't arguments largely about the name of that-which-binds? From or in the name of that-which-binds? Appeals to reason in its infinite ambiguity seem to imagine reason as a heavenly machine the true thinker incarnates (which isn't to say they are wrong or right).

if we decline the very widely held assumption shared by theists and atheists alike that the point of the inquiry should be to find an answer, a knowing. — Jake

I like this issue. We might talk of a blind faith in that very project that rarely sees itself. Your idea here is similar (not the same thing) to Stirner's notion of 'the sacred,' which is something like a most general name of the project of finding/imposing trans-personal knowledge. Can this structure ever be dodged? Or is it just softened as it becomes aware of itself?

Your view also reminds me of negative theology in the revelation of the possibility of a not-knowing and a not-needing-to-know. In some ways the unveiling of this possibility is arguably a sharing of knowledge. The difference might live in the emotional tone of the presentation. A project that is invisible to itself as presupposition will perhaps tend to be more shrill. Those who resist the project are proclaimed fools. Reason is one and universal, the holy ghost itself for the woke. But when 'reason' is appealed to as a kind of fixed object that doesn't divide and interrogate itself, is this still reason, or an idol named 'reason'?

*edit: I mention 'theology' because one could think of 'god' as the open space in which one can debate whether or not there is a god, god as possibility itself, god as a questioning, etc.

Metaphysics is possibly destabilizing to one's sense of reality, possibly in similar way some drugs are.

The metaphysically adept are like deep sea cutters and welders. Their confidence and skill of logical consistency as well as their knowledge of prior arguments allow them to brave the waters of chaos to cut or fix something somewhere. What they are welding is like the structure of their own minds, which in effect restructures the world, but this is also true of everyone whether we are aware of it or not.

"He comprehended that the effort to mold the incoherent and vertiginous matter dreams are made of was the most arduous task a man could undertake, though he might penetrate all the enigmas of the upper and lower orders: much more arduous than weaving a rope of sand or coining the faceless wind."
— Borges

~J.L. Borges, Circular Ruins

Metaphysics is like weaving a rope of sand or coining the faceless wind, toward what end? — Nils Loc

I just wanted to say that I loved this post.

I pulled out some quotes that speak to me.

[C]onsciousness owes its privileged status...to the possibility of a living vocal medium. Since self-consciousness appears only in its relation to an object, whose presence it can keep and repeat, it is never perfectly foreign or anterior to the possibility of language. Husserl no doubt did want to maintain, as we shall see, an originally silent, "pre-expressive" stratum of experience. But since the possibility of constituting ideal objects belongs to the essence of consciousness, and since these ideal objects are historical products, only appearing thanks to acts of creation or intending, the element of consciousness and the element of language will be more and more difficult to discern. Will not their indiscernibility introduce nonpresence and difference (mediation, signs, referral back, etc.) in the heart of self-presence?
...
It is not in the sonorous substance or in the physical voice, in the body of speech in the world, that he will recognize an original affinity with the logos in general, but in the voice phenomenologically taken, speech in its transcendental flesh, in the breath, the intentional animation that transforms the body of the word into flesh, makes of the Korper a Leib, a geistige Leiblichkeit. The phenomenological voice would be this spiritual flesh that continues to speak and be present to itself—to hear itself—in the absence of the world.
...
[W]hat is signified by phenomenology's "principle of principles"? What does the value of primordial presence to intuition as source of sense and evidence, as the a priori of a prioris, signify? First of all it signifies the certainty, itself ideal and absolute, that the universal form of all experience (Erlebnis), and therefore of all life, has always been and will always be the present. The present alone is and ever will be. Being is presence or the modification of presence. The relation with the presence of the present as the ultimate form of being... — Derrida

I think a 'polar' dualism can be defended by emphasizing the body which runs from a 'mind' pole to a 'matter' pole. So it wouldn't really be a dualism but a continuum structured by two concepts.

How can mind move matter? What is it to move my mind? How different is it for me to move my hand than a thought in my mind? I agree that the mind is the without-which-nothing of being fully human in some sense, so I understand the priority of mind. But maybe what we could use most is richer understanding of mind. The sort of pure mind that can't interact with matter may just be a theoretical fiction in the first place (along with some kind of pure matter.)

One thing I"m sure of is that we only start theorizing after already being in the world and learning how to use certain words. If 'mind' and 'matter' don't have sharp context-independent meanings, this would seem to limit their accuracy. And of course we live in our bodies, see through our eyes, and hear through our ears. The body is entangled with most of our thinking in an obvious way. In certain states thought has something like a maximal freedom to wander around in itself. Is this exceptional state in which the body isn't explicit quietly take as the inspiration for 'pure' mind? It seems to me that usually the mind is immersed in the body and the subject is immersed in its doing. Perhaps something that is neither matter nor mind is fundamental in some sense. We have our reasons for sorting things out. In everyday life we feel watched by and listened to by some 'objects' and not by others. Here at least a fairly sharp dualism seems to prevail.

For Husserl (at one point in his thinking) history was

nothing other than the living moment of being-with-one-another and in-one-another of original meaning-constitution and meaning-sedimentation. — Husserl

This is along the lines of what I am interested in, the functioning and genesis (sedimentation) and perhaps mortality of 'public' meaning --the kind that makes this sentence more or less intelligible to you, dear reader. Are you with me as I write this? Not actually but perhaps virtually, in all of your ambiguity. And aren't I virtually present as the unity of a voice that sews these words together? In the same way we don't see patches of color but objects in a worldly context, 'immediately.' Artificial theories ignore the 'immediate unity' of the voice among voices and of enworlded objects, postulating simpler entities as their ingredients. 'I am an ego or pure witness or being itself who/that unconsciously transforms a therefore un-see-able input into objects in a causal nexus by joining concepts to intuitions.' And then we can build up a world from inter-subjectivity. So break the situation into parts and put them back again to recover the situation. This has its merits. But how seriously should we take these parts? How much life remains in these constructions?

Debates often take these parts for granted as uncontroversial entities. 'Mind' is a bishop and 'matter' is a knight on the chessboard. The sign has slipped away from the historical voice, and seems to shine with an independent meaning (and maybe it does, but how determinate is this meaning?)

I relate this to Hegel, who seemed to be thinking of the evolution and the becoming-more-complex-and-self-referential tendency of an accumulated sediment. The self mirrors or repeats or even sometimes leads the social sedimentation of meaning. I have to catch up with the conversation, catch up with my own time (its cutting edge) if I dream of extending as opposed to merely repeating an already overcome-but-not-forgotten distinction.

By really trying something? I agree.

Awesome. Should be food for further conversation. I think 'time' is central somehow.

Interesting concept, one that I might be inadvertently paralleling in my own philosophical musings. Husserl is one more person I haven't yet read. Do you recommend any particular work his that best focuses on this concept of "phenomenological time"? — javra

I am just getting into him, so I'm reading secondary summaries and already being amazed. I think he wrote a particular essay on that.

This is great so far.
https://www.amazon.com/Edmund-Husserl-Phenomenology-Dermot-Moran/dp/074562121X

And this was the first one I started with:
https://www.amazon.com/Phenomenology-Explained-Experience-Insight-Ideas/dp/0812697979

I found it extremely disciplined in its exposition. It's shorter than the one I'm on now. It's hard to pick a favorite. Both/either are great, if you don't mind starting with a secondary source. Apparently there is steady steam of unpublished work being leaked out, so there's something to be said for trusting an expert anthology of the main points in this case. Husserl just didn't publish most of his thinking, for various reasons. There's a dramatic story about a mountain of his writing being saved from the nazis.

For this and other reasons, Husserl, in his On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893-1917) (1991), deemed time-consciousness the most “important and difficult of all phenomenological problems” (PCIT, No. 50, No. 39). — IEP

https://www.iep.utm.edu/phe-time/#H1

Yea, I share that feeling. Being anything but saintly myself, I'll gravitate toward closure in some situations. But its one thing I always admired about many of the ancient skeptics (which I've now come to nickname fallibilists): they sought open-mindedness and thereby greater understanding. The other side of things can, often enough, be all-knowning of all pertinent absolute truths. Not my cup of tee. — javra

I am fascinated by the ancient skeptics too, for the same reasons. I believe in sharing the best ideas I currently know and at the same time holding to a kind of openness.

BTW, wanted to share this since it seems to me to be pertinent to the discussion:

There was a man with tongue of wood
Who essayed to sing,
And in truth it was lamentable.
But there was one who heard
The clip-clapper of this tongue of wood
And knew what the man
Wished to sing,
And with that the singer was content.
— Stephen Crane

This in context of meaning as value and the signs we thereby produce. Beside which, I like this guys poetry. — javra

I love Stephen Crane. I've even read Maggie. He is a very fascinating personality. He has a cutting intensity.

I guess we really have to give the meaning 'behind' the signs its due. It's just a fact of experience that sometimes we feel truly understood. We are satisfied. Feeling seems to come into play. The value of what is being said has to be understood along with the content (isolating aspects of what is really a unity.)

Here again, I agree. — javra

I think this 'rush' of meaning is why 'time' was Heidegger's symbol or synonym for existence at one point. The first draft of Being and Time was called The Concept of Time. I am recently finding that Husserl (who I should have checked out long ago) was already on to lots of 'post-Husserlian' insights in his published and unpublished work. Husserl's theory of 'monads' is fascinating. He tries to do justice to what it's like to be 'alone' and yet share a world and share concepts. And he tries to describe the rush of meanings or 'phenomenological time.' I love this stuff for just trying to look at what is most intimate. I love the idea of philosophy as a becoming more aware of what is already here (as opposed to constructing complicated theories.)

Admittedly revealing what is 'already here' can look like the construction of complicated theories at times. There is something like the 'fixed idea' of an isolated ego shut off from reality-in-itself that is taken for granted. I'm not saying such a theory is bad or doesn't get something right. I'm just talking about the way that a critical discourse perhaps always holds something fixed and unquestioned in way that blinds it. Maybe we only ever theorize by holding something fixed, no matter how radically free we'd like our critical thought to be. [Oh no, am I repeating the same structure I am criticizing as insufficiently critical? I'll leave it in anyway.] Anyway, this is where Heidegger's 'dismantling' comes in. Sometimes we 'cover over' what is there with theories of what 'must' be there.

:up: I very much like that. :smile: There is no living being that exists devoid of other living beings with which it interacts. Even the most solitary and un-evolved of lifeforms live among predators and prey. The existence of experience is not an "I" but a "we".

Though, here thinking of Sartre's play "No Exit", this can be a blessing as well as a curse. :razz: — javra

Nice. I'm glad we can meet on this. You focused perhaps on external community (one important aspect) while I was focusing on something like 'internal community' (the other side). And I agree about other people sometimes being hell.

I postulate two basic intentions, something like opening and closure. We see this on philosophy forums. Some people are clearly in the mood to find others in error (possess the truth solely, denying any kind of mystery or darkness yet to be explored.) Others are clearly in the mood to find common ground and maybe share in the pleasure of what they both already understand. I'm no saint. I understand that it's nice to feel more along some path than others. But I'm glad to be primarily in mode (as I understand it) of genuinely wanting to share in some beautiful ideas and simultaneously expose them to questioning and therefore enrichment that I couldn't foresee.

This goes back to our earlier theme. Value and intention is fundamental. We can approach someone (including some author) from the very beginning with a will to negate (hide in ourselves as already-knowing) or a will to explore ('confessing' that just maybe we still have something to learn from others). I have a sense that maybe the great thinkers (my favorites) were very much open. They 'suffered ' dissonance and tarried with the negative, thereby synthesizing a better positive account. I adore Hegel for his awareness of this process. The process became self-conscious in Hegel, one might say. (And maybe centuries before in others in other lands entirely.)