I wonder to what extent anger is a response or something more. — Jack Cummins

I think the normal - non-pathological - sense of anger is that it is provoked or evoked by something specific. If anger develops into a personality trait then that is something much more complex, probably pathological.

Anger is a negative response, hatred is the intentional cultivation and perpetuation of a negative response or characterization. That's the usual trajectory this takes I think.

You cannot say that something is objective because it "refers to a body."
— Pantagruel

Well, that is quite literally the meaning of objective.

Unicorn refers to a body in that sense too, but it is not objective, it is a construct of the imagination
— Pantagruel

If you mean that 'unicorn' is subjective insofar as it only exists as a thought inside the mind, yes.

Moreover, the perfection of what you are describing explicitly precludes its material instantiation.
— Pantagruel

Not always. — Lionino

You are equivocating between the sense of an objective perspective and an objective thing. An objective is something intended and can be either a material thing or an idea. An objective thing has a real, independent existence, ie. is an object. All you are doing is declaring that realism (or maybe Platonism) is true, nominalism false.

t is not instantiated, sure, but it is objective, as it refers to a body. — Lionino

You cannot say that something is objective because it "refers to a body." Unicorn refers to a body in that sense too, but it is not objective, it is a construct of the imagination. Moreover, the perfection of what you are describing explicitly precludes its material instantiation.

:up:

This is what makes paradigm shifts revolutionary rather than evolutionary. — Joshs

Can you elaborate on this evaluation? Why could a paradigm shift not be both?

Unlike others, I don’t see anything wrong with the wording of the question. It’s out of Hume. — Jamal

:up:

Yes, I was going to say the same, but I feel like I'm always rocking the boat. The nuances and ambiguities only give scope for discussion. That's exactly what a good philosophical question should do.

Moral goodness, as described in the OP, is actual perfection; which is not contingent on agency itself — Bob Ross

Bob, morality is by definition, historical convention, and common sense related to human actions. Do you not see that by redefining morality in this way you are completely altering its fundamental meaning?

No one, because it requires 0 friction, 0 heat leakage, among other things. — Lionino

Ah. So this is that sense of perfection that precludes objective existence. Like a perfect vacuum. Or a perfect circle. Really more of a Platonic ideal.

The machine does a perfect Carnot cycle, here replacing perfect with efficient would turn a fine sentence into a nonsensical one. — Lionino

I didn't think it was nonsensical, but wow, ok. So who has built one of these perfect Carnot machines in actuality?

The machine does a Carnot cycle, which makes it the most efficient machine possible under the current laws of physics. That falls just fine under the definition of perfection. — Lionino

Yes, as I said, if efficiency is your criterion of perfection. That is still a value judgement. You could replace the word "perfect" with efficient and your description of the machine would lose nothing. In fact, I would argue that describing it as efficient is more accurate and less misleading. Perfect implies there is some overarching objective standard, which there is not (barring your declaration that this is it of course).

edit: I'm actually a huge fan of the concept of efficiency, and I favour it over perfection because it is more descriptive.

↪Gregory

But as Lionino explained in his Carnot cycle example there are certain operations that are produced which are perfect with little room for dispute so how do you account for that ? — kindred

The machine is accurate. Which means it does what it is designed to do with a very small margin of error. In what sense does this imply that the machine is perfect? Efficient maybe.

Same for you chair argument. If anything, the design and construction of the chair are effective. The chair qua product may be durable, comfortable, attractive. Whether or not it is more durable, comfortable, attractive than any other chair is purely subjective. A "perfect" chair would have to perfectly fit every human being, and this is a manifest impossibility.

A little bit about my personal philosophy of understanding. My studies in cognitive science led me to believe that we don't steer our minds the way that we steer a car, more like how you would steer a battleship. However your mind is programmed to think right now (the dominant set of cognitive habits) largely determines the nature both of what you will perceive (based on perceptual-conceptual filtering) and how you will react or respond. It is possible, of course, to alter our cognitive habits, but this usually requires prolonged focus and effort, akin to the process of acquiring a new skill.

When it comes to reading and understanding complex material, therefore, I believe that something like digestion and gestation is needed. New understandings need time to be assimilated into the complex adaptive system that is our practical conceptual framework in order to produce what I conceive of as deep understanding.

The whole point of new knowledge, however, is not merely its assimilation. I assume that what we mean by the growth of understanding is the accommodation of our conceptual framework to the new knowledge. Since this conceptual framework determines what we think and how, the accommodation to new knowledge should ultimately result in constructive changes to our conceptual framework, and thus to constructive changes in the way we perceive and interact with other minds and with reality in general.

One aspect of this change should relate to the steering-delay phenomenon itself. That is, as my awareness of my dependence on my self-constructed conceptual framework for decisions and actions grows, appropriate focus and effort should engender the skill of identifying, acquiring, assimilating, and accommodating to new constructive knowledge. That is, we should be capable of learning to more directly control our interactions with reality by more rapidly developing new cognitive habits; essentially becoming more free, which is to say, having a more immediate-constructive discretion over our choices. This conforms with Platos'/Socrates' contention that wrong choices are made out of ignorance and are to that extent not free.

Yes, but pragmatic goodness applies to everything: it is just goodness in the sense of utility. — Bob Ross

Yeah, I don't get this at all. Anything human made is human value-laden. What you are saying makes less than no sense to me.

The usage of 'esoteric' relevant to this thread is in connection to religious or spiritual teachings and metaphysical claims, not to disciplines like quantum mechanics and relativity; the latter are disciplines that yeild predictions whose obtaining or failure to obtain are observable. — Janus

Actually, it is in relation to philosophy specifically, which covers a lot of ground. Including I think the general meaning of esotericity and esoterica. The OP and I had no problem establishing a fruitful dialog in the context of my observations. Perhaps it is you who misunderstands.

To sum it up, Kant is a metaphysician without knowing it (and therefore is an incomplete metaphysician). — LFranc

Collingwood concurs with this. In Kant's identification of a reality we can "think but not know" he sees "the very essence of scientific dogmatism" - which is to say, in his terms, an un-self-critical metaphysics.

:up:

PoS is on my to-reread list. Unfortunately my already much re-read copy is falling apart. I'm thinking about duplicating my entire collection of German Idealism on the Kindle. Electronic textual notes are really starting to grow on me.

The art of philosophy is important but it involves all of these facets of life. The 'esoteric ' may involve the 'rejected', especially ideas of subversity. It is such an area for thinking, and may involve many aspects of critical thinking about religion, politics and so many assumptions which may exist in the nature of human social life. — Jack Cummins

Yes, this sounds reminiscent of Derrida and Foucault.

A mathematician surely believes in the laws of probability more than he believes in physics (being fallible and all) or most other things, and yet, it may be that in a Quiz show for one million euros, nervousness may take over and he may answer to the Monty Hall problem that he does not want to switch based on common sense and instinct, but probabilistic analysis will give us that you should switch each time: — Lionino

I don't consider making a selection in a game to be reflective of acting in meaningful sense, more like playing a game. Life, by and large, isn't about "game-show moments." However it is often about committing to a course of action that may be inherently uncertain or risky.

I think that "esoteric" is a concept that has historically covered a lot of ground, and has been subjected to a lot of abuse, both from within and without. No doubt there have been people who have manipulated esoterica for their own ends. And there are scientists who fake results. But as you point out, we are entering radically new territory and our understanding of the nature of understanding itself is evolving. I think there will always be those who view things as esoteric which others feel they can see clearly.

↪Pantagruel Seems to me the Jungle is already at harmony in its various gradations of life death growth and rot such that it thrives and new forms of life can even be found within such a teeming and toiling ecosystem. — Vaskane

:up:

Goodness is not normative: it is the property of having hypothetical or actual perfection. — Bob Ross

The property of being measured by any standard is always going to be subjective. You repeatedly use human artefacts as exemplars of goodness. Those are not even an objective cases to begin with; human intentionality is literally constitutive of what a car or a clock or a radio is. You say to imagine a wild jungle in complete disarray versus one that is in harmony. That is simply absurd. Natural systems are in a constant process of evolution and change, so there is never any criterion for preferring one configuration over another, let alone a perspective from which to apply it.

Good is irretrievably subjective and normative.

In a very real sense, the entire progress of human understanding can be seen as the development of knowledge from esotericity to exotericity. What is evident to the eyes can be deceiving. The evident reality of illusions is dispelled by the understanding of "esoteric" perceptual mechanisms. The primitive search for animistic spirits leads to the discovery of "esoteric" concepts like atomic structure. How long did humanity search for the esoteric atom? Millenia.

Neural networks function precisely by being able to detect and utilize connections which are not trivially evident, but hidden with the complex datasets that are the representations of things. Who is really to say how many "hidden" connections actually exist in the fabric of our reality? Does the fact that we have already discovered so many mean that we should stop looking? Or that we should look even harder?

What kind of people seek out esoteric knowledge? People who have questions that exoteric (accepted) knowledge does not answer. Esoteric traditions often involve learning detailed rites and detailed normative schemas, suggesting how we ought to react and respond, to live. Who is to say those are incorrect? Freemasonry exhorts values of charity and integrity. Even if the only value of esoteric knowledge is the subjective benefit conferred by the knowledge itself...isn't that enough?

The noumenon? It’s a critical concept: philosophers like Leibniz built systems around noumena, and Kant is diagnosing this disease. He also thinks he can’t just ignore it, because he regards it as an unavoidable product of the understanding. — Jamal

I guess my problem is I see this from the perspective of Fichte and self-founding conscious understanding - it looks like a fiat to declare an unknowable objectivity.

However, if it functions as a demand or a constraint, is this just the constraint of trying to attain a perspective of (per impossibile) pure objectivity? Then it is still a subjective act.

The noumenon is the concept of a purported thing beyond possible experience, and as such cannot be distorted.

That is to say, there is nothing there to be filtered or distorted. Simply to be an object of knowledge is for a thing to be known via the senses and understanding. If there is no possible disembodied, unperspectival way of apprehending a thing, then the idea of distortion has no meaning. — Jamal

Isn't this just a vacuous concept by definition then?

If upon transcendental contemplation we determine X,Y, and Z are the conditions for our knowledge, doesn't X,Y and Z become the lens upon which we view the noumenal and what we then actually perceive we refer to as the phenomenal?

I get that science will only concern itself with the phenomenal, but I don't see how you reject the suggestion that the phenomenal is a distortion of the noumenal. Isn't the phenomenal just the noumenal filtered through X,Y, and Z as you described it? — Hanover

This is kind of the problem that I am wrestling with too. Maybe Kant just lacked an awareness of the scope of application of scientific knowledge as it has subsequently ensconced itself in our world.

So, what do you think counts as esoteric knowledge then? Or can you give an example of what you would count as an esoteric tradition? — Janus

"intended for or likely to be understood by only a small number of people with a specialized knowledge or interest."

So while you may not agree that a difficult subject matter that is likely to be understood by only a small number of people counts as esoteric knowledge, it fits well with the definition. I believe Heisenberg thought that quantum theory was esoteric, in that it housed inner-mysteries, even for its initiates....

Knowledge will always retain a unique subjective element because it exists as known by a subject, and nothing in reality lives in a pure abstraction. The meaning of 2+2 might be invariant, but its meaningfulness will always be as unique as every situation of application is.

As Hanover just mentioned on the Kant thread:

If we concede there are conditions for our knowledge and our knowledge is subject to those conditions and if those conditions are peculiar to the perceiver, how is our knowledge of anything objective?

I concur completely with this assessment. Knowledge always exists exactly to the extent that it is enacted...by someone.

Esoteric knowledge is usually claimed to be knowledge by revelation or enlightenment, and hence.
by implication, to be infallible. — Janus

I don't see any evidence that those extreme forms of esotericism are what is in question here. However I can see this degenerating into a mishmash of historical and critical terminologies and I don't see the benefit of that. Most people would consider loop-quantum gravity to be an esoteric topic. Its very complexity renders it inaccessible. What is esoteric for some is not necessarily for others. Which may be the point.

I don't believe that many people actually have "deep personal commitments", but even if they do, they are just that, personal, subjective, and they are beliefs, and hence don't count as knowledge in the intersubjective sense. — Janus

Again, I don't see where you are qualified to make that judgement for anyone but yourself. You claim to be capable of acting in the absence of a deep commitment, fine, I accept that. I think that most people care, and that care about what they do is indicative of values, in other words, beliefs. Propositional knowledge is just "facts." The most important decisions in life are value-laden. Some of the most stirring events in human history involve people acting in a counter-factual way, symbolically, based on belief. Bottom line, you can't turn ethics into propositional knowledge. You can express it propositionally, but you can't found or reduce it on propositions.

But firstly, I don't believe any intuitive (or propositional for that matter) knowledge is infallible, or context-independent, and secondly such "knowledge" is by its very nature personal, subjective. — Janus

I don't recall where esoteric knowledge became infallibly divine revelation in this discussion. That's a straw man by me, and not reflective of how I view intuitive knowledge.

I don't see many Christians living up to Christ's ethical teachings — Janus

Just because people claim to believe something doesn't mean that reflects their true beliefs about the nature of reality. When people commit to action they do so based on whatever that deep personal commitment is. That isn't circularity. Action is an index of belief. Many people might have problems in enunciating those beliefs, that's true. Which is itself good evidence that there is more to belief than propositionality.

Afficionados of esoterica generally don't want to admit that, though — Janus

Believers in intuitive knowledge don't agree with your definition of knowledge. Correct. Propositional knowledge is a latecomer. Long, long before anyone ever had the notion that there was propositional knowledge people knew things. Every day people make decisions based on intuition and in the absence of adequate evidence. That's the nature of life. Propositional knowledge is inadequate.

That most people probably just pay lip service in the actual living of their lives to their basic assumptions about the nature of reality is a telling point. — Janus

I don't see any evidence anywhere that this is the case. I accept your avowal that this is true of yourself, but what evidence do you have that people betray their own fundamental understandings as a matter of course?

Scientists "make" working or methodological assumptions which themselves presuppose "metaphysical" commitments — 180 Proof

The degree to which any given scientist may believe in the provisionality or scope of said metaphysical commitments of course can vary. Which is why science can find itself in its metaphysically exaggerated form as scientism. The danger of course being people who lean in this direction without acknowledging that they are so doing. Which is why I hold that our metaphysical beliefs underpin the way we actually live our lives.

But that is the knowing of acquaintance, familiarity, not the kind of propositional knowing I had in mind when I asked the question. — Janus

It is the knowing of things that by their nature or current status resist propositional knowledge. The fact that you reject this kind of knowledge in favour of propositional is perhaps the problem. Since that's the gist of the OP I'll just reiterate my response.

It seems more accurate to say that science makes pragmatic, that is methodologically determined, assumptions — Janus

It is a commonly held view that science makes metaphysical presuppositions. I personally believe that our metaphysical presuppositions underly our basic orientation with respect to reality, and that everyone has them, whether they are aware of what they are or not.

Metaphysical assumptions of science

Doesn’t any viewpoint or theory implicitly lead us in certain directions and prove useful in the sense that it organizes our world in some fashion? What does it mean to ask if a metaphysics is ‘accurate’ in its depiction of the real? Can’t different metaphysical systems be ‘accurate’ in very different ways? — Joshs

I don't know if metaphysics is so much of a system as it is a question. Science makes metaphysical assumptions, within which it does its thing. The assertion that those particular assumptions constitute the answer to the totality of the metaphysical question is where the issue arises. Does scientific information do justice to the totality of of what it means to be a thinking, caring, acting human being in a universe that both yields to and supports and memorializes our thoughts and deeds? There are a variety of competing paradigms in civilization, religion, science, art, history, philosophy. Each of which can try to lay claim to being the ultimate metaphysical truth. It would seem to be a synthesis. Is any of these disposable?

Is mathematics metaphysics now too? — Lionino

Well, certainly the Pythagoreans went in that direction. Mathematics is definitely a very powerful thing, as things go.

Valid, no metaphysics can make a married man a bachelor. — Lionino

Which would have no sense or meaning were there not extant men, both married and unmarried. So yes, logic is unconstrained by metaphysics, just so long as it is meaningless.

You don’t think the history of metaphysics has to do with the changing ways we think about the sense of meaning of what is real? In other words, isn’t metaphysics more about sense than reality? For instance, if one can claim that the change in physics from Newton to Heisenberg is a change in metaphsical presuppositions, then this involves a subtle transformation in the sense of meaning of terms like mass and energy, rather than whether mass and energy are real. — Joshs

I guess we are asking whether metaphysics is better characterized by the theory, or what the theory is about. Like we assume any viewpoint has metaphysical presuppositions, but then the validity of those presuppositions is ultimately borne out...in a metaphysical sense. In other words, a metaphysical theory is consequential. So if your metaphysical theory is the substantially dual, and metaphysics exists as a theory in your head, material metaphysics is completely completely disconnected from the noumenal metaphysics, then you are left with idealism.

Which doesn't seem to be the case. Rather (and intuitively) having a theory about the nature of reality (if it is accurate) ought to prove useful in some way, or lead in some direction. So I'd say metaphysics is about the relationship between our understanding of reality and reality. And if reality impinges on understanding, then understanding must in some sense impinge on reality. Either there is a connection and a contact - which has to then be mutual - or there is not. People ask metaphysical questions in order to effect fundamental reorientations, not so much of what specifically they do, but the way in which they do things. If I come to believe in the transcendence of the spirit, perhaps I change the way I perceive, think, and act.