Indirect realism implies that we would think of the world as dualistic - of being some way independent of how we perceive it. — Harry Hindu

What comes to my mind are too 'gaps' that are related but maybe worth distinguishing. There is the gap between the individual and his community and then the gap between the community and 'language-independence reality' (a problematic but intuitively appealing concept.)

It might make more sense to say that primary "substance" is processes, or relationships. — Harry Hindu

I like this kind of approach. Our experience of the world is dynamic. In some ways looking for a stilled and constantly present essence can only be looking for a useful fiction. Of course it makes sense to hunt out the constantly present. We can work with these things. A physical law that always holds is always available as a tool. A map that doesn't 'lie' by reducing the situation is useless. Even if no meaning act is a perfect repetition of another act we are still motivated to ignore the difference. A prudent ignorance (a filtering out of noise) is like our basic strategy.

In other words, our minds stretch these causal relationships into what we call space-time, and these causal relationships are the fundamental units of reality. — Harry Hindu

Fascinating theory. I must confess that I'm still somewhat opposed to the project being framed in terms of finding fundamental units. IMV, any description of what is has to acknowledge what makes such a description possible and intelligible. I'm not saying yours doesn't, but it doesn't go into much detail about its own presence. Let's say we have a theory about what is fundamental that does not include language. Maybe it theorizes the origin of language. Yet language is also the origin of this theory of the origin. This doesn't make the theory worthless. But perhaps it calls for an enriched account.

I'm not sure if what I said addresses this. Could you elaborate if I misinterpreted — javra

I was referring to the finite resolution of language as I sometimes experience it. The lifestream can take itself as an 'object' (it has a kind of memory of itself or presence for itself). Language is most real, I'm tempted to say, as it rushes by. Meaning both remembers and anticipates. It's not (for me, for the most part) instantaneously present. It is 'stretched' and 'on the way.'

Among the most basic are those of positive valency (attraction toward) and negative valency (repulsion from). It's the relevancy something holds to the individual. But buried somewhere in all this is a parallel belief in some forms of universality as it applies to experience, regardless of the individual. This being what makes meaning communicable via signs. — javra

I very much agree with you here. This kind of thing is beautifully addressed in Towards the Definition of Philosophy (early and 'breakthrough' Heidegger). 'It values' What is philosophy after? 'Who' is philosophy? Is philosophy ever really just lonely old me? Is truth intelligible apart from others?

The philosopher as person strives toward a kind of impersonality as the height of his own personality. Maybe I am creative, say something new. But I say it not only for myself (when I strive toward philosophy or truth). Why is the unveiling of truth valuable? I have a sense that these questions will activate in some a sort of allergy to anything eerie, but I don't have a kind of heavenly machinery in mind. What I mean is something like the 'I' who uses language is not exactly an 'I.' The subject that speaks this theoretical fiction of the subject is already plural in some sense, already speaking 'outward.' I don't possess the signs. I think in a language that is already open to others, perhaps as open to them as it is to me. I have to interpret my past self like one more text that is outside me (albeit with the help of memory.)

Yeah, I don't even know what to make of his quip. Was it in good faith or what? — Wallows

Good faith. I am pro-philosophy. I am a weirdo who stubbornly uses language that gets itself misunderstood. I would rather say something big awkwardly than say lots of trivialities correctly. It's better to fail at really trying something in my view.

Yes, all good questions or a roundabout way of saying the same. What else do you think? — Wallows

Well I think we are 'in' language-with-others in a way that's hard to specify. In some ways the isolated ego is a theoretical fiction. I've been looking in Husserl lately. He's pretty awesome. As far as I can tell, he's seeing in what way Plato got something right without adopting Plato wholesale.

We can say that we construct concepts, that they are mental, but they also play by their own rules in some sense. There is a certain 'necessity' in mathematics for instance. And perhaps there is even a kind of dialectical necessity in the concept of philosophy, a 'natural' way from position to position. So maybe thinking of concepts as 'within' the subject (however true or valuable in some sense) simultaneously betrays the mundane experience of the subject living within these same concepts. The whole thing is difficult and messy. Will we ever be done saying what it is to say? Meaning what it is to mean? Probably not.

I just got told on a physics forums to go see a psychiatrist for posting the OP. — Wallows

Wow. People really do hate philosophy at times. But then what happened to Socrates again?

I follow that. I'd only add that many of a more literal mindset have problems with the term "nothingness"; rather than interpreting it as "no-thing-ness" they can only comprehend it as unbeing, or an absolute lack of presence. Using this figure of speech led me to a whole bunch of problems a long time ago. But whatever works in getting the meaning conveyed. — javra

Good point. Yeah, Heidegger famously got himself mocked for his nothing that nothings. The poetic phrases are bad in that they can confuse but good in that they try to share the emotional charge.

I believe in certain, if not most all, cases we very much do so. I'd say that when we name an abstraction (e.g., world, or animal) we possess the meaning via the name. This, naturally, after we've associated the required meaning with what the name logically necessitates (e.g., neither rocks nor plants can be animals). — javra

I agree with this. What I had in mind is the nature of this possession. What is it to think the idea of a tree? Of course we 'know.' We can have the experience right now. I vaguely picture a tree. I imagine typical uses of the word 'tree' in sentences. How does it sit in my mind when plucked from the flow of using it unselfconsciously?

What I have in mind is something like a stream of experience with a certain elusiveness for itself.

So, which is it? Is the world composed of sensory impressions or quarks? — Harry Hindu

For me we still have the problem here that 'sensory impressions' and 'quarks' are signs that point to meanings that themselves point beyond themselves. The world, in my view, is composed of (among other things) acts of meaning. The world is composed of (among other things) attempts to say what the world is composed of. I know this may sound strange. But what does it mean when a metaphysics excludes itself from the real it tries to grasp? If acts of meaning are 'unreal,' then any theory of the real is itself unreal. It's odd that a theory of the real would be satisfied with building up itself from quarks or sensory impressions that themselves function within this theory.

What would be the smallest unit of the mind? Ideas? Sensory impressions? It seems to me that it would be the latter as all of our ideas, knowledge, imaginings, language itself is composed of sensory impressions - colors, shapes, sounds, smells, tastes, feelings, etc. These things come together to form the contents of our minds (emergent properties). — Harry Hindu

For me this bottom-up approach is not the way to go. We can't atomize the mind and reconstruct it. Of course you mention emergent properties, so you see the problem. But I'd say that our atomizing theories themselves emerge from this same 'emergent property.'

Another way we might approach this is to 'confess' that meaning (in all its embarrassing and suspicious mysteriousness) is fundamental. The world or what exists is clearly not only 'meaning' (whatever this meaning is), of course. But existence is always already meaningfully structured. Of course we can theorize about the origin of meaning as an act of meaning.

In the pre-Kantian sense of the word, this to me exemplifies our direct apprehension of the noumenal—itself a hidden aspect of all our apprehensions of the phenomenal which hold any type of significance for us. What I'm here aiming to illustrate is the logical possibility that the two are in some way separate and distinct in the here and now—this rather than as a hypothetical potential to be actualized only in some form of absolute state. In other words, though they are almost always intimately entwined, to me the word at the tip of one's tongue illustrates the complete separation between meaning and sign in the form of an experience available to all of us less than ideal subjects. — javra

I like the sound of this but I haven't quite grasped the first part. I like the 'noumenal' as a hidden aspect of all our apprehensions. I am open to greater and lesser separations of the signified from the signifier. We have to have some experience of this to install the distinction. And I suppose the mind is full of images too. So I will definitely confess the limits of the idea that perfect separation is impossible. I suppose that even this limited version of the theory would still be useful for bringing us to the awareness of how intertwined the meaning and the sign usually are.

a meaning for which we momentarily do not know the sign for; a meaning which we momentarily cannot re-present. — javra

You may a fascinating point. Is this a defense of pure meaning? I can relate. But what's fascinating is our stretching toward this pure meaning. We want to clothe it in signs. Can we possess it without the signs? And do we ever quite possess it even with the signs?

When I look at language in memory, I have the sense of a 'finite' resolution. Just as the eyes aren't perfect, so I experience meaning to be less than perfectly present and clear. Using the same analogy, I use my imperfect eyesight all the time without noticing its limitations. It's the same with language. But when I check I can experience something like a fading-out. My eyes and my mind can experience a kind of frustration or resistance.

What do you make of words that are at the tip of one’s tongue? — javra

Great question! I relate this to the dark place from which we speak and listen, a kind of 'nothingness' that haunts the 'ideal subject' and makes it impossible. This plunges us into the issue of time, of the 'living' temporality in Husserl and Heidegger, which is not clock time whose institution it makes possible.

When an author decides to write a book and create fictional entities like Harry Potter, or Homer from The Illiad, where do these fictional entities exist? In what substrate or form do they exist in? — Wallows

If a philosopher decides to classify such fictional entities in categories, is he not in the same situation as the author? In what sense and where do the ontological categories of the philosopher exist? How does ontology exist? What is the 'form' of the 'form' itself? Can the form be mental? But the mental is itself a form. The form or the meaning-charged sign or the concept is maybe what avoids the what-is-it of philosophy while making it possible.

Popper talked of 'World 3,' some kind of space that humans share. Your question reminds me of the question of what it is like to have or be 'in' a language (which means being with others at least in some virtual way as far as I can make out.) BTW, I think Popper at the very least sees the issue. I don't accept or reject any particular part of his theory. I just respect his response to our naked situation with something other than denial.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popper%27s_three_worlds

If we're talking the talk because it's fun, and we know that's what we're doing, I have no complaints. To the degree I have a complaint, it is with the illusion that the talking will lead to anything other than more talking. — Jake

Thanks for your reply. I like this. We can think of someone embracing there not being some hidden outside and just learning to enjoy the play of a search for better as opposed to final talk.

I'm not opposed to seeking, just trying to make such efforts more realistic. If we are seeking to be a bit saner, sounds good to me. If we are seeking for some permanent perfect solution, sounds like a self delusional becoming trip. And I'm not even against that, but, you know, this is a philosophy forum, so... — Jake

I think we are more or less on the same page. To me this is something like a death wish concealed in the quest for a perfect, permanent solution. Life is dynamic, on-the-way, imperfect, vulnerable. It makes sense that life seeks stability (a happy household, routines, etc.), but there is a kind of morbid 'infinite' version of this that can lead to a kind of torment. I guess I read it in terms of self-obsession that is closed off to the beauty and fascination of the world, especially in other people. To be in love with life is just not to have certain problems (and yet to still have others.)

I'm liking it. It's great sharing in something beautiful. If I had to pick a fundamental philosophical motive, I'd say it's a journey toward sharing something beautiful, a ideal sociality.

, I should confess that I don’t have an aesthetic for Derrida-like philosophy; at least as I so far know. I instead prefer systematic approaches. For instance, regardless of what one makes of it as a body of understanding, I greatly admire Spinoza for attempting to make all his premises explicit for each and every conclusion in his Ethics. — javra

I respect that. I love Hegel. I've had my doubts about Derrida, a kind of resistance to him. I felt the same way about Heidegger. Eventually I was won over in both cases. Derrida has been in the background for me for years, but I'm foregrounding him in a new way. All of these thinkers and blending in my mind. I keep reading one in the light of the others. If I had to pick a center, it might be Hegel. But Hegel is importantly added too or enriched for me by those who came after. (And yet I read them with Hegelian insights. ) Harold Bloom talked about a Shakespearean reading of Freud. That's the kind of thing.

It’s a personal aesthetic preference and, as is always the case, when we each honestly follow our own individual aesthetic calling—regardless of how much we deviate from the norm in so doing—we each remain aligned to the truth that is us as well as to the truths with which we have yet to be fully acquainted. The aesthetic, after all, being as much an experience of pleasure as it is a calling toward that which is at once familiar and unknown—toward a heart’s home that awaits on the horizon, so to speak. My way of saying: to each of us our own aesthetic preferences and paths. — javra

I very much relate to this. The aesthetic is a call to the heart's home. And there may be a wisdom that draws us on. To find something beautiful and fascinating is to pre-understand its worth. An example: I don't all pretend to have fully understood Hegel or Derrida or any single thinker. Not at all. I respond to a call, read more and think more, and continue to be called back. I find a little more each time, a steady enrichment. In some ways nothing would be worse than getting to the end, knowing everything. That would be a kind of death. I'm tempted to speak of living well in terms of moving toward the call. For me this call must be from out of the dark but promising future. It is 'proper' (authentic, most 'us') for 'futural' beings to move into the future as darkness or pregnant nothingness.

I differ here in believing that it asks for meaning ... which is however only conveyable—be it to other or to self—through signs. But to me there is a distinct ontological differentiation between the two. — javra

I agree that it asks for a meaning. I guess one of the things I'm getting from Derrida so far is the impossibility of a perfect separation of sign from signified. As I understand it, this perfect separation is something like the heart of metaphysics. A pure meaning perfectly present to an ideal subject, who is so transparent to himself that he doesn't need the signifier anymore. He lives among forms purified of all contaminating sensuality, history, contingency.

To be clear, I think the distinction (even in its imperfectness) is vital. This imperfect distinction makes the critique of it as imperfect possible in the first place. Perhaps what is at issue is a vision of certain inescapable entanglement of the signified and the signifier, the world and the subject, the reader and the text, and so on. Grasping this entanglement would have value as a kind of loosening up which is also a facing up to our endlessly at-least-a-little ambiguous situation.

Either remain hunched and silent or try to talk and tell 'lies'. The feeling was frustration and anger. and despair. I felt like this was a prison I was trapped in that couldnt be conveyed. — csalisbury

That's a pretty great description of Hell. I've been there. In some ways not being able to say it is the very heart of its darkness. The flow outward is damned up. One understands oneself as a disease that should not be spread in the worst phase. But one believes in this darkness, that one has seen the truth. So one protects others from this terrible truth. Or (maybe at the heart of the heart of the darkness) one thinks of oneself as purely crazy, afflicted not by the truth but the fantasy of a dark truth. I'm almost afraid to summon it to memory. Let's just say that it's amazing how disgusting and obscene existence can seem or be for certain states of mind. One maybe ever experiences a wonder along with it, that it could all be so disgusting and perverse. 'Implosion' and black holes come to mind. The world becomes a hollowed-out stupid skit, oblivious to its own nullity. Of course death appears as a sweet release. Suicide beckons to such a state of mind as the only heroic and/or rational act available.

To me one of the strange things is that a person can be mostly happy and yet still unexpectedly dragged into this darkness, surviving it and returning to be happier than most even. This helps me make sense of the some of the great musicians who committed suicide. Good music comes from ecstasy, from being happier than most. But probably sensitivity is two-edged. Heights and depths come together perhaps.

Tho actually - I think that this:

There is a religious aspect of friendship that I have in mind connected to forgiveness of sin
— sign

is at the heart of it, what lets you move beyond. I remember at one point while i was deep in 'phase ii' geting drunk and scribbling down 'god cant forgive what he doesnt understand'

What i think i was missing is the hubris in thinking that 'god' wouldnt understand my suffering and 'sin'. It was really me saying - 'i can still hide what i need to' camoflauged as an anger at being failed by others — csalisbury

Beautiful. What comes to my mind is something like authenticity as being in touch with always being still a sinner and a fool to some degree. God has to be a sinner and a fool to understand. Only a sinner and a fool can understand a sinner and a fool from the inside. A friend as true friend is an unfinished sinner-fool or only half-wise listening. Love-trust-hope builds a bridge from the undecided to the undecided. I feel that you know what I'm getting at, but I will add for others that I don't understand all this 'love' talk in terms of determinate metaphysical entities arranged in some quasi-geometric proof. The 'opened-ness' I have in mind is 'behind' or 'beneath' the signs, near the place of their genesis and reception (which I nevertheless can only point to with signs.)

I'm stumped why you'd use the word "living" there. I don't know what it's supposed to amount to re "what's really going on" when we're talking about signs, signifieds/signifiers/etc.

I have little notion of what "a unity of signified and signifier" would amount to, or what "something like" that unity would amount to. — Terrapin Station

Since you like short posts, I'll do my best to focus on this. Is the distinction of the signfied from the signifier ever perfect? A related question is whether the distinction of the subject from the world is ever perfect. A final question is whether the thought of the isolated ego is theoretical fiction taken as an axiom that blocks access to an 'experience of language'? While these issues might seem separate, I don't think they are.

A last note is that any kind of rigid interpretation of the 'sociality of reason' (in terms of obscure but determinate entities) is missing the point. IMV, there's something like a fear of anything that smells 'spiritual' that encourages a kind of blindness to what it is to be 'in' language in our ordinary lives.

I think what sign is saying is that every subject (i.e. person) is an essential part of the process of meaning and signification and, to that extent, transform their own nature in accordance not only with the signs/meanings they use, but in accordance with the very process of signification itself. — Mentalusion

That's definitely along the lines of what I'm saying. We might say (never quite getting it right) that the subject 'is' the process of signification, and that this process is not just signs but also a kind of pregnant void from which we speak and listen. As Hegel might put it, 'spirit' or the 'subject' is its own product. We create our own nature to some degree. The pursuit of self-knowledge is also self-creation. And this 'self' knowledge might even include an insight into the fundamental sociality of reason. The 'inside' is a function of the 'outside' as much as the reverse is true. The 'I' can only understand its lonely self (explore itself) in terms of a public language that it always already directed beyond it, toward the world and others.

the process and nature of signification as a linguistic phenomenon can offer insights into the process and nature of the world itself — Mentalusion

Indeed. The separation of world and subject is a product of signification in the first place, one might say (to some degree, anyway). A knowledge of the real that ignores its own genesis can only be a partial knowledge of the real. If the thinker or subject neglects himself in pursuit of the real, there's a kind of forgetting here. One assumes that one's own signification is somehow outside the real. One assumes a Kantian distance from the real, making an error perhaps out of the fear of making an error.

In other words, an important aspect of the world itself is that it is by nature intentional.

But sign can correct me if that's not barking up the right tree. — Mentalusion

Yeah, that's really getting at it. If we just look at what is always already there, we have dynamic intention and unveiling. One might say that we don't mediate the real but rather the real is mediation itself, or mediation mediating itself. I'm not saying this gets it exactly right, but I am trying to open the complexity of the situation.

I think this 'negative theology' (of Derrida and others) addresses the 'infinity' of the other (not finite, not bounded.) To exist is to be open 'forward' toward the other and the future, the future as other and the other as future. Perhaps negative theology insists on this 'in-' which it attaches to the finite, darkness attached to what has already been successfully unveiled, completing (?) the unveiling by indicating the darkness in or of 'god,' which is perhaps nothing more than the dark place from which we listen and speak. Such 'completion' seems to plunge us back into life and time, into being on the way to an endlessly deferred completion. So it is and it isn't a final word. It is 'proper' to walk into that darkness as darkness, that possibility as indeterminate possibility, the incalculable and therefore genuine future, in which both our death and life wait.

I mentioned gift-giving versus law-bringing above as two rough kinds of intention. I think this is delicate issue. It's seem easy enough to disguise law-bringing as gift-giving, and we can also think in terms of the unveiled law as a gift. I sometimes doubt my own openness as I stubbornly adhere to my own account of what is 'really' going on. But why should our intentions be more perfectly decidable than the sign or the text? This is more 'incarnation'. The darkness of the other is already there in the 'single' self. Derrida gets into Husserl's retreat to the soliloquy. Husserl has to deny that the self actually communicates with itself, can learn from itself. All such learning must be an illusion, since the self has to be so transparent to itself to no longer need signs and time --if this pure self is going to found a metaphysics of perfect presence of both the 'forms' and the self to the self. Ah, but my own motives are unclear to me. Am I really being open? Or am I imposing one more system ? Am I being phenomenologically 'sinful' by insisting on constructions as genuine phenomena accessible to anyone who'll really check? Should I be reading rather than writing now? Am I lost in vanity when I could be getting my learn on? I am not transparent to myself. I don't know what I will say before I say it.

You have no way of supporting such a generalization. People fall on hard times through no fault of their own, or by being unlucky. We are all just accidents of geography and family. Those who may have fallen into chaos also cannot be judged, we are all victims of circumstance and you really shouldn't judge anyone until you have walked a mile in their shoes. — Jamesk

I like the sentiment. I wasn't generalizing though. As I said, I had a particular person in mind. I have lived the difficultly of the situation of defending the order and happiness of my household against the claim of another.

As far as ideal shoulds, I'm not against them. (And if I was it would be an ideal should itself, I think.) But it's not really about anything as abstract as judging. It's more concrete than that. Do you give the junky who knocks on your door at 3AM money for 'food'? Do you let your brother-in-law crash when he very well might steal from you or set your house on fire? One says 'yes' or 'no,' whatever the complexity of one's mental state. Is everyone innocent in some sense? I think so. But that 'in some sense' doesn't slay the dragon of living through concrete situations. If a friend confesses to me that he has committed adultery, am I bound to tell his wife, an acquaintance? [This is a fictional example.] My current view on the matter is a distrust of any algorithmic approach to such things. The problems of real life are something like a collision of duties and values. This does refer back to your essentially Christian perspective (the forgiveness of sin.) As I act within a certain ignorance and darkness toward the good imperfectly grasped, making my own mistakes, I have to forgive other imperfect approaches. I have to try to understand why so-and-so did something I wouldn't have done. Can we learn without a certain openness or forgiveness of difference? Right here and right now the possibilities of our conversation depend on an mutual openness toward one another.

There was a great bit on the trolley problem in The Good Place. This show puts the ethicist in a Hell disguised as Heaven (for being endlessly indecisive and closed off to others in his righteous self-absorption.) He is joined by a stereo-typically selfish and cynical person along with a person obsessed with fame (in terms of charity as conspicuous goodness, of course) and a low-minded dummy. Of course they are all lovable in their way, and they become lovable largely as they learn to love and forgive one another and work together against the devil who runs the place disguised as an angel. In the second season this devil joins them. It was his idea to try a new form of Hell that looked like Heaven and yet was designed to shame its guests. They kept figuring out it was an illusion by coming together.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfIdNV22LQM

This second part is where it gets hilariously concrete and gory.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWb_svTrcOg

I mention in conversation above that Derrida seemed like a negative theologian to me. I also see something like the progress of incarnation in iconoclastic 'atheistic' philosophy. In short the divine that is revealed is us who seek and speak about the divine. Negative theology can be thought of as undoing the alienation in positive theology, completing the positive theology that makes it possible, attaching to it a darkness that completes it.

'Theology is the critical study of the nature of the divine [my emphasis].'

To what degree is philosophy in one of its higher aspects a negative theology? 'I know that I know nothing.' Must we interpret this as 'I know that I don't know anything'? Or can know 'the' nothing? If the 'nothing' is the darkness of the other or the darkness of the future, then perhaps one can know it as unknown or as something one is never done finding the words for, perhaps as the something that makes trying to find the words for it possible. Am I a darkness that moves toward the light? Or perhaps a light that moves into the darkness, a torch that wants to see because it knows that it does not know (knows that it knows the nothing as a darkness, perhaps without admitting it.)

'I know the nothing.' I see a darkness in the heart of the light, its optic nerve. What can I know? What is real? I know that there is a questioning. There are questions. Do questions exist? What a strange question, trailing a narrow conception of existence. Is the existence of questions more controversial than the existence of question marks? What does it mean to use language to seek a reduced form of the real beyond language? For language to ignore itself?

When I used to object to any kind of 'spiritual' language, I understood this objection in terms of something like the phenomenological project (which I hadn't been exposed to.) Only what I could confirm 'within' was worth considering. I wanted to grasp the basic situation in its truth without the detour of suspicious constructions. One aspect of being critical is indeed the negation of arbitrary constructions. But it occurs to me that there is another aspect of being critical, which is (surprisingly perhaps) a being open. Surely denial is a 'sin' for any thinking that would be critical in its motion toward the valuable and authoritative. Why shouldn't we be just as likely to hobble our thinking with denial as with an inappropriate belief?

If credulousness sees or pretends to see what is not really there (for the ideal community?), then denial is the refusal to see what is there (its own movement in a shared language toward something like an ideal community?) Since credulousness is so obviously a 'sin' for critical thinking, I focus on denial here.
A certain kind of philosophy/theology denies or ignores its own movement away from itself toward the world with others who hear, along with a basic sense of its situation that makes that project intelligible.

I have trafficked in demystification, philosophy as therapy or an under-laborer or garbage man. The question is whether one is honest with one's self about one's investment in this reduced goal. Perhaps saving the world from nonsense and hysteria is itself a hysterical, nonsensical goal. The therapist may grasp a certain falseness in his position. 'There is nothing to see here, folks.' And yet this 'nothing to see' is exactly what apparently needs to be shown (flaunted, advertised, a cause of pride.) 'The secret is that there is no secret.' Nothing is hidden, except the fact that nothing is hidden. Unveiling seems fundamental here. The philosopher unveils, sometimes in the spirit of gift-giving and sometimes in the spirit of law-bringing (ignoring the limits of this distinction to emphasize an 'opening' or 'closing' difference in intention.).

[wrong thread]

In search of our own pleasure we ignore the plight of the weak and of those yet to be born. IMO we need to have duty as the main position for morality. A duty to ourselves, to others, to the world, and to future generations. We must learn to forfeit pleasure for long term security. — Jamesk

You do touch on a profound issue here. For me to enjoy my 'negative theology' next to my space heater and my clock radio playing classical music, I have to do nothing about a particular person in my mind who may be outside without shoes right now in a tent (it's been cold here.) In theory I could be hosting this person, but this person is in their situation exactly because they tend to turn order into chaos (and recently squandered an unearned, relative fortune on drugs in a spree.)

In short I do see a certain guilt and violence in even the higher pleasures. We are entering Nietzschean terrain. Is the suffering of many justified by the heights that a few can reach? If we embrace duty, on the other hand, are we not instituting a structure of infinite deferral? When are we finally done working and living for the future, a future that only arrives with its own future? I don't have easy answers here. Personally I embrace my 'selfish' yet community-directed higher pleasure. Are we caught within some intrinsically elitist structure? If you or I present duty as above beauty, for instance, are we not raising those who agree with us to a superior status? And is there no pleasure in the sense of such status? A pleasure in righteously denying pleasure?

And what of the pleasure in imposing the truth of duty as above pleasure? Let's think where duty-as-absolute is going. Was it a 'sin' in some sense for Mozart to write his piano sonatas? It may be so. But can we regret that sin?

Sir may currently choose between jackets made from three types of material, Virtue, Duty, and Consequence. Once you choose the material there are further choices of 'cut' and 'style' for Sir's jacket, but yes the options are quite limited until someone invents or discovers a new concept. :) — Jamesk

OK. How would you categorize the idea that virtue is itself already 'heaven'? It feels good to be good. There are different ways to feel good, but some of the best ways to feel good involve sharing something like beautiful truths with others.

And here we have your Utilitarian / hedonist position. — Jamesk

I am more guilty here. I do propose that we think in the direction of happiness. The word 'pleasure' has a crude connotation. We think of pleasure seekers who neglect the potential for higher states of being. But I find it hard to separate high states of being from some kind of positive feeling, something like a 'deep' pleasure. The pleasure I take in philosophy has a depth or height than typical more-bodily pleasures. I personally still wouldn't oppose lesser pleasures as the enemy of higher pleasures. It may be that a robust sensuality and 'emotional intelligence' in 'the guts' is even essential to the heights of thinking --especially if thinking is directed finally at an ideal community. We have to bring truth to the other as a gift and be open to that same gift for others. The rest largely seems to be a kind of will to claim the center akin to hoarding all the gold. An unfriendly argument just bangs positions together with no interest in synthesis and communion.

That is your Kantian position. — Jamesk

Must we fit it into that jacket? IMV, what I am pointing at is likely to interpreted 'mechanically' or in terms of fixed entities. I have something more organic, familiar, and yet elusive in mind. What do your words aim at? They are directed outward not only to me but to anyone who sees them. Do they not aim for further clarification, beyond the current grasping of the situation? And is this further clarification not only mine but anyone's? The clarified truth I strive toward is not just mine and yet it is not alien to me. It is where we all (ideally) meet.

For me there is a deeper kind of structure than the image of the ego viewing the world through some eternal filter. This structure makes that image presentable and valuable in the first place. I have in mind something language understood in its full mysteriousness.

If we saw people as minds the world would be very different. Ignore the body, the sex, the social position and just focus on the mind. That is where our individuality lies, it is everything important in our lives. It is the next stage of evolution that the materialists are not yet ready for and so do all they can to focus on wealth, beauty and fun. — Jamesk

I agree that our highest or most individual selves are in something like our (passionate) minds. What to me is fascinating is that our highest reaches of individuality are directed 'outward' toward an ideal community. I am most fascinated by that in 'myself' which transcends me in some sense, but not as an 'alien' object. Instead what I have in mind is a best self that I can live toward or up to, along with a sense of the universality of the virtue involved.

Personally I'd give wealth, beauty, and fun their due --especially beauty and fun (the worship of wealth for its own sake is hard to defend.) For me beauty and fun live at the heart of philosophy. Ultimately I think we want our lives to be beautiful and fun, which is not to insist on some shallow beauty or fun but quite the reverse. What I have in mind is a natural movement toward 'deep' beauty. Perhaps the incoherence or ignorance of an account of what is (of a philosophy) is a kind of ugliness that we seek to repair, so that the pursuit of truth is also a pursuit of beauty. Confusion is a kind of disharmony, perhaps, and thinking is a harmonization that simultaneously creates a new dissonance to be overcome (until maybe, as part of the philosophical dream, a final and stable harmony is achieved that no longer needs to be fixed.) Personally I think we never get to a point where the real stops trembling, but I do think we can live more and more in a sense of harmony (or at least more often in a sense of harmony which is maybe more intense.)

Descartes employs a two prong retreat (mind and matter) from solipsism but is left with the mind-body problem as well as a few others. — Jamesk

I think a vague dualism is defensible in terms of understanding the distinction to be non-absolute. Another fix might be to recognize the intrinsic 'sociality of reason' (Terry Pinkard). None of this has to be understood in mechanical terms (like perfectly distinct matter-stuff and mind-stuff.)

As I see it, our life among both others with minds like our own and things without minds is more or less primary. Calling everything mind or matter even looks like a strange game from this perspective. What is the urge that drives such a project? Why cover over the complexity with a renaming that abolishes all living distinctions? Do I eat 'mind' when I eat a triscuit? Is my own mother 'really' just matter? We can assert such things and even defend them, but we don't stop treating triscuits and mothers and very different entities. This gap between theory and practice fascinates me. For me it points back to a questioning of the questioning. Why or how am I invested in materialism versus idealism? What is at stake?

You can separate the formal and material causes of substantial being. So you can point to the form - the bottle - and you can point to the matter - the glass. But then you are losing sight of the thing you thought you were talking about - substantial being - in saying the form "just is" the matter. — apokrisis

Exactly. In some ways collapsing distinctions (this is 'really' just that) is simply moving backwards on the dialectical trail. A forward movement might instead take up those same distinctions 'under erasure' as partial and therefore incomplete truths or positions. A stitch in the coherence tempts us either to ignore it or fix it with more narrative or thinking. Distinctions accumulate. Our thinking becomes more differentiated and complex, containing our previous positions along with their limitations and what we did to synthesize them and proceed. From this position accepting the 'X versus Y' framework as we find it (uncritically) is itself the confusion. The staging of the issue is the heart of the issue perhaps.

There is a shared world that is represented in unique, yet similar, ways in unique, yet similar, minds. — Harry Hindu

I agree, and denying this would seem to make the very project of philosophy senseless. What is one denying exactly if there is no shared worlds or similar minds? We are talking to others about something relevant to or existing for us all.

What maybe becomes interesting then is what is means for us to able to talk to another (to share in a language.) Just as we talk about the objects we share in one and the same world, we really on something like a realm of shared concepts that are there not only for our senses (the sound of voice and the sight of faces and marks) but also for some other hypothetical faculty (an innate capacity to largely live 'in' this realm as we live among the usual objects.) The ego that proclaims its isolation in the 'I am' and 'I doubt all that is not me' uses concepts are already intelligible to others. Anyone can speak the 'I,' so that the 'I' refers beyond the pituitary gland from which it spies on a perfectly private realm.

The point isn't for it to have "weight," though, either. It's just to accurately describe the world in a way that's coherent/that makes sense. — Terrapin Station

I can relate to this project. What I meant by 'weight' was something like a clarifying force. Any 'ism' that doesn't understand what motivates its opposite is likely to be shallow and miss exactly the part of the problem that the other side sees. Framing the situation as the combat of positions might already stultify the pursuit of that coherent description of what is. At the very least a one-sided position that sees its opponent as absurd is failing to give a plausible account of that opposing position. If one really understands the opponent, then one can trace the logic of that opponent to the place where it goes wrong.

From my perspective, idealism and materialism both see complementary aspects of what is. For me the natural move (and maybe the natural move of thinking in general ) would be to synthesize these insights (which various thinkers have already tried to do.) IMV it's illuminating to consider what the idealism vs. materialism debate presupposes in order to exist as a debate. What does philosophizing 'blindly' assume as it speaks outward about what is to others?

I think its often less about any particular therapeutic modality and more about the relationship itself. — csalisbury

This makes sense to me. I can't look at the other as a machine to be fixed, even if that is part of the situation. There is a religious aspect of friendship that I have in mind connected to forgiveness of sin. I think I would find it off-putting if a therapist presented a kind of above-it-all invulnerability. On the other hand, that may be exactly what a client wants him or her to project.

But I can imagine highly intelligent and critically minded clients seeing only confirmation of their general sense of the world as a stage of fakers in such a pose. To be above it and invulnerable is to longer be humanly present. Theories might be great, but maybe a certain kind of client wants exactly some kind of genuine connection, even if this connection is muddied by commerce. Perhaps a good therapist isn't really doing it for the money (while still needing to make a living.)

One thing the "anti-guru" approach (for lack of a better word) may be able to contribute is to help the reader clarify their relationship with all these enlightenment related philosophies. — Jake

I agree, and this for me threatens the distinction of guru and anti-guru.

Does the reader see the philosophies as a means to an end? Or are they an end in themselves? — Jake

I some experience them as means to an end. But for me philosophy eventually exists to keep its own flame and praise itself with an infinity of self-descriptions. Their is an ecstasy in enlightenment talk. We have the image of light. I think of a torch. Olympians carry a torch.

What if thinking is a flame that wants to grow? To think bigger and brighter? The anti-guru approach might be summed up as a pointing at the seeking as the very thing it seeks and yet flees. But the seeking is really only potentially the thing sought. The seeking has to somehow recognize itself as the sought, and I think we see this kind of thing in Hegel (and apparently in much earlier traditions.)

But does anyone really need all this grand talk? I wouldn't say so. Some love it and relate to it. Others seem to do well without it, perhaps simply because they have good relationships and a user-friendly situation in the world.

"The reshimu is the consciousness of knowing that one has “forgotten.” It is the consciousness which arouses one to search for that which he has lost, the awareness that God is “playing” with His creation, as it were, a Divine game of “hide and seek.” A forgotten melody lingers in the back of one’s mind, and although he is unable to remember it he continuously searches for it, and whenever he hears a new melody (that might be it) it is the reshimu which tells him that it is not."

Thats the thing that would be lost in Husserl's project? — csalisbury

Wow. That's a powerful quote. Speaking only as a passinate reader who's trying to make sense of it all (and having only recently really looked int Husserl), I'd say that yes, Derrida seems to be adding that to Husserl, without denying Husserlian experience. The 'non-foundation' or void or space in which one remembers one's forgetting and searches.

I been trying interpret Heidegger on the future and death lately, and 'darkness' seems like an important metaphor here. Is Derrida (after Heidegger) trying to impossibly shine a light on darkness? The darkness is the nothing, the indeterminate. Heidegger justifies the possibility of a pre-science in terms of the apparently still-too- theoretical conceptual grasping of 'there is something' being revealed as the hermeneutical structure of life itself toward this intended, indeterminate something. The future as possibility is the future as a darkness, a pregnant nothingness.

Yeah! again. I wonder if these moments are something like sustaining 'foreshadowings' of where things are heading. Part of my trouble, in the past, has been to cling too strongly to these moments, and to become devastated when they disappear. Maybe part of the progression also involves figuring out how to relate to them when they're absent. — csalisbury

I like to think of embers still hidden in the ashes. When I'm really doing philosophy (reading a book that is really doing it for me or writing paraphrases that confirm some kind of 'spiritual treasure'), I have a less Dionysion version of the experience. I listen to classic music when I do philosophy, so it's a different feel than the rock, hip hop, pop, and jazz that my friends and I would party with or within.

This reminds me of your distinction above, incarnation and deferral. We try to get back to what we had once. And maybe it felt like 'what we had once' from the first time. There's a certain 'eternity' in some feelings, a kind of recognition and familiarity. Maybe because they can make one feel so at home on earth. Arriving for the first time back home.

Very much in agreement that pictorial thinking (I might say 'scenic' thinking) has an edge on conceptual thought which.. — csalisbury

I like 'scenic' in its emphasis on a world, a social context. The depth of the we tends to be forgotten. Or at least I overlooked it in prior more egoistic positions. In retrospect, my first concern was with burning down all external authority. I was trying to create a space of pure freedom, come to self-possession. This isolated and free ego is like God the Father, alone and outside of everything finite. As Feuerbach might say, this is god as man as opposed to god as men. The divine is fixed as a solitary object. Its image is the self in isolation. Any notion of a primordial 'we' is a threat to the ego's purity, a contamination. And a rigid conceptual thinking (that hasn't experienced the mortality, slippage, deferral, and anticipation in all living signs) can only understand this primordial we in terms of a device made of transparent aluminium, when what is intended is the nature of that rigid thinking itself 'toward' others-in-shared-world. The truth is something like what an ideal community believes, and the truth-bringer in seeking recognition imposes on the actual community in its name.

What varies quite a bit is the tone of this imposition, so that maybe this imposition can instead be a gift. I have to admit that I love 'theology.' It speaks to something I might call essentially human in me. It's like a poetry of the real. It is constrained by being revelation of what is, and this is only possible if 'what is' can fall in love itself sometimes. (I know I rambled some here. I'm not as sober as I could be.)

It's interesting that you reference christian thought - the idea of the sign as incarnation makes a lot of sense to me. But I've also heard the sign discussed in judaic terms, as the endless deferral of the messiah's arrival. Though---that deferral is often discussed as the deferral of parousia which is itself a christian term (I think?) denoting the second coming. So maybe: the space of language as a space of remembrance/forgetfulness which tends toward some future event (which is also a past event)? — csalisbury

Wow. Beautifully said. I love the ending, and that resonates for me. The origin is anticipated. Speaking of forgetfulness, Derrida also mentions a forgotten conversation in Spurs. It was recounted to him, including some of the strange ideas he shared then, but he has no memory of it directly, only a memory of being told about it. And then Nietzsche forgot his umbrella. As Derrida indicates, nothing exlcudes reading the totality of Nietzsche in this once line. But who knows why he wrote this lonely line in his notebook? Who can claim the presence of that meaning act? Could Nietzsche himself even do it?

I like the blend of deferral and incarnation. Is the incarnation ever complete? In a way I think Derrida is trying to say the incarnation in order to complete it. But the incarnation is perhaps always in progess because it is incarnation. To be incarnate is to be on the way to the anticipated origin or forgotten future.