Agreed. By promise I’m referring to Sparky caring about an anticipated event, and trusting in its relation to the sounds we make. You break this trust enough times, and the sounds start to lose their significance for Sparky. I knew a kelpie once who would respond only to her caregiver’s voice. She could also follow hand signals that even contradicted his voice commands (he’d taught her to ‘stay’ beside a pretty girl on the beach while he called her repeatedly - a neat trick). — Possibility

Yeah, that's a good point. Is this trust is a sign of higher intelligence? Or is it mere expectation, not unlike a turtle of a fish "expects" the sun to rise or there to be a provision of other edible things. Am I, in my thoughtless morning opening the refrigerator door and grabbing the milk, just like Sparky?
I think there is a difference is what underlies expectation. In me, there is a complexity attendant to it all, and this is a second order reflectiveness implicit in all prereflective thinking. I seem to read Sartre writing this in the Transcendental Ego.
Dogs cannot think symbolically, nor can they, therefore, think about thinking, experience in a way that is about experiencing.

As to logos and reason, to add some further comments, we moderners have lost the likely animist notion of reason that used to be pervasive with the ancient notion of logos. We nowadays abstract reason as something that (all too often, only elite) sentient beings do in their intents for figure out what is. Whereas, to my best understanding, logos used to address reason as that which in any way determines, or else sets the boundaries or limits of, that which is; e.g., all four of Aristotle’s causes were of themselves reasons for, and, hence, would have been elements of the cosmic reasoning for what is (to the Stoics if none other). What we think of as causation, then, used to be an integral aspect of the logos, i.e. of the cosmic reasoning.

Once so conceptualized, its an easy inference to the conclusion that speaking – the determining of what is, can be, etc., via symbols wherein the being(s) in question produces, or causes, the determining symbols – is itself one aspect of the logos which animates reality. But then so too could be construed a dog’s bark, for instance; the dog’s production of a sound which can symbolize, and serve to determine in others, the dog’s emotive state of mind and associated intentions. At any rate, from this vantage of cosmic reasoning, it can be important to remember that lego, from which logos is derived, can mean “I put in order” and “I choose” in addition to “I say”. Logos then, can be interpreted as the cosmic ordering which chooses what is … and which expresses itself (hence “speaks”) via this ordering. — javra

You know, there is something about this kind of thinking that I find compelling, though not quite as you put it. You and I are, after all, the world, and the logos as any of its expressions is what the world is doing through us, so the ascription of the logos to the world, as what the world is and does, is not an improper anthropomorphism of sorts, as many would claim. I grant, it is hard to make this intuitive connection, because we are all so used to thinking of the world as, as you say, boundaried, we forget that there is some foundational genesis of all that is (See Eugene Fink's Sixth Meditation, e.g.; though here, it is a differently conceived). "Cosmic reasoning" may be pushing it, for I don't think the world of other things, trees, tables and desktops, is apart from language, rationally constructed, and that there is an "ordering" or "choosing" going on in the underpinnings of the world. WE are, however, what the world does and is and cannot be separated, so there certainly is a "becoming" in the world through us, these agencies of rationality and meaning; the world is becoming (but here we run into postmodern concerns I will not bring in)
So, in my sympathy with this kind of thinking, I am talking about logos being IN the world, and not separate from it by the boundaries we impose: clearly we are boundaried thinkers, but we are the world as well. As to our dogs and and other intelligent animals, I am interested in the underpinning of language, whether it is barking or speaking words, which is experience. Dogs experience the world, and in this there is an "innocence" that we should envy, but our intelligence is something we (and hence the world) are doing that is qualitatively unique, something new that our evolving condition manifests. What Sparky cannot do is think explicitly, and cannot separate language from immediate affairs, can't wander off into a corner and wonder. Wonder takes thought to new boundaries as it brings in questions of existence and experience that have no answers, but around such questions there develops a culture inquiry.

How a thing is seen and how it is understood, although related, is not the same. — Fooloso4

I think this needs some clarity. Seen and understood? Are these not synonyms?

mechanic might look at a bunch of parts and see how they are connected. She constructs the object both visually and in practice without the use of language. — Fooloso4

You mean, without the explicit use of language. Of course, I don't talk my way through walking down the street. But then, the ordinary course of my apprehending all that is around me is filled with narrative: I see a tree and "familiarity" of the seeing is not like that of a feral child/person (though, there is an issue about this). It is contextualized beneath the surface event.

Wittgenstein talks a great deal about pain. Toothache is his favorite example. Language does not bring the pain to light. It is an expression of pain. That someone is in pain may be obvious without uttering a word. — Fooloso4

Certainly, but Wittgenstein notoriously refused to talk about ethics because it has this impossible metaethical dimension: the Good and the Bad, not as contingent constructions, but as presuppositionless phenomena. Nothing can be said to penetrate into its meaning. It is not a thing of parts, and I think this is right. But then, it does "speak", unlike, say, the color yellow. The metaethical bad speaks in terms of an injunction: don't bring this into the world!

Not that Kierkegaard thinks like this, but that his system description is rendered complete only in relation to an embodied existence of eternal rationality, a position he necessarily assumes by omitting it from his description. — Possibility

You need to abide by what Kierkegaard says. His descritption is contra Hegel and he is not a rationalist, but insists this rationalality we witness in our affairs, far from being some adumbration of the God's full realization, is altogether other than God. K does not hold that all is foundationally rational and partially grasped by reason in our own zeitgeist. This zietgeist is quantitatively "sinfull" (not int he typical Lutheran sense at all; he flat out rejects this)

The aim of philosophy is to ultimately embody the logical methodology or ideal relation between inner and outer system. If we are to accurately describe this using language and logic, then we need to include in our description, as Wittgenstein and the TTC have done, a purely practical method for embodying an inner/outer relation to the ‘impossible unutterable noumena’ assumed by the description. Without this practice, any understanding of the methodology is incomplete. — Possibility

But there is analysis prior to this "inner/outer" opposition. Remember for Witt there is no "outer" talk is this talk is intended to be outside of logic. Like many phenomenologists, he has this prohibition against making sense out of a world that is not a fact, a "state of affairs". Such things are not in the great book of facts (LEcture on Ethics). Inner and outer are confined to language, whether it be language games or logical constraint. One cannot "talk" outside of a language game. The case I want to make here is that Witt and Kant and Heidegger and others are wrong to think like this, in this prohibitive manner, drawing a line between what can be said and what cannot. "If there is anything better than reason, reason will discover it" I read once, by someone. If one is allowed, and not implicitly barred by cultural norms and their judgments, to look closely at the world's threshold with the Other the meaning of which is not possessed by a restrictive system, like empirical science (which presently cares little presuppositional levels of inquiry), and I am talking What begins with Kierkegaard's Hegel attack in his Anxiety: when he talks about the spirit posited as a synthesis of body and soul he refers to an existential movement which is qualitatively distinct from a Hegelian quantitative movement of reason to reduce the affair to its terms.
You find K very much continued in the post, post modern works that follow through on Husserl's epoche. See Michel Henry on the four principles of phenomenology)
As to the incompleteness, see the epoche, the phenomenological reduction of Husserl. The very idea of such a thing is currently being played out in essays on the concepts of givenness, being, presence, and so on. There is a paradox in this: One the one hand, as Heidegger tells us, there is no philosophical work to do until we are already embedded in a world, like the American world or the Greek world in which language and culture constructs a self fit to self reflect, and break free of the das man. So to be aware at all, one has to first be enslaved (so to speak). BUT: this breaking free is the core issue, not the embeddedness. There is something IN the world that is primordial and profound. Heidegger thought this, but detested metaphysics. He did not see what I want him to see, that I am pushing here: Metaphysics is the radical other of the world, beyond its totalities (of course, Levinas at the bottom of this. See his Totality and Infinity, if you dare).

From Kierkegaard’s perspective, the assumption is that God already occupies this non-alienated, original condition, and that we merely dance around it. Any embodied relation we may have to this ‘impossible, unutterable noumena’ is subjective, affected and illogical. He relies on Hegel’s description, with its assumption of the open-ended progress of time/energy (a device Heidegger also relies on in his own way), to demonstrate the anxiety of our condition. Without this temporal relation, Kierkegaard’s description lacks directional attention and effort, rendering our condition eternally absurd. — Possibility

Dances around, or, "sinfully" at a distance from. Affected, you mean in God's grace" illogical: remember that K will have his knight of faith the grocer down the street. Making the Leap, the movement is a qualitative step out of Hegel's quantitative zeitgeist, is the simple act, really, one K could not achieve, he confesses, of positing spirit, which is born out of existential wonder, then affirmed to be an alienation from God, realizing one's freedom in this, which gives rise to this foundational anxiety in which one can only yield to God to bring about a complete synthesis, which is definitive and eternal. Illogical in that it is NOT a discursive process. We are dealing things that are their own presuppositions (another borrowing from Hegel: something truly foundational has no explanatory priors or reductions). Subjective: Yes, of course. The big crit contra Hegel is this point. This relation to God is individual and the soul is individual and eternal as is its alienation; not some en masse dialectical movement of culture in history.

Open ended progress of time and energy? You use the term energy, but it makes what they say sound like something they didn't say. Heidegger doesn't talk like this. Of course, YOU can talk like this, obviously, and if you want to say that Heidegger really says this, you have to tell me explicitly: You know, Heidegger says this, but consider this using another term. Energy is a science term, and Heidegger would never go there. Regarding Time, his is a phenomenological ontology that deals with the structure of experience (another word he never uses).

Do you believe we can talk about pain as an unconditioned term? Pain is a quality, as I described, but alternatively it’s a logical relation between attention and effort, or a motivation to alter relational structure. There’s no one way to interpret pain, but perhaps there is a correct methodology to align our condition with an ideal origin, and in doing so unconditionally understand pain. — Possibility

Calling pain a quality is like calling it a property. The issue comes in the "calling" at all. Not that we shouldn't call things something, but it takes a "qualitative leap" of a Kierkegaardian nature (putting God on hold) to see that in the calling we reduce it to what it is not. Language does this, reduces the world to something manageable, but what it is (contra Heidegger) is simply metaphysics. We live and breathe in metaphysics. My cat is metaphysics.

There is only one way to understand pain, and that is phenomenologically, through the reduction (Husserl): apply a lighted match to your finger and observe. SImply this. All explanatory theses are off the table and one is to allow the event to "speak". It is a method of apprehending the world that many believe (like K) has extraordinary religious, mysterious (Witt on the "Good"; see his "what is Good is divine, too. That sums up my ethics"; see the Tractatus on this) dimensions.
The area of discussion here is metaethics. We can talk about this if you like.

Again, not that he consciously thinks this, but that his system description automatically assumes a logical embodied position. And logical not within language, but in the sense of a complete (absolute) relation. But I do heed your warning, nonetheless. — Possibility

Okay, I actually lean this way sometimes. But look at Derrida's Margins: affirmations are NOT affirmations. To speak at all is never a singular event, but is a plurality, a diffusion of what is not explicitly spoken, as the number one "defers" to the number two, three, and so on. These literally constitute the affirmative proposition.
Big issue: What remains is the impossible, the Other, the nonliguistic actuality of this lamp on my desk. I may not be able to speak it, but I am IN its presence and th e speaking it does not cancel its otherness.
How is it that I can stand outside of language from a stand point OF language, to make this kind of affirmation? So wonderfully weird. I will spend my days looking at the way Husserl's reduction addresses this.
So here is my case against bringing physics into the deepest level of inquiry: at the deepest level, there is no more discursive redundancies to be brought in, for we are here at the threshold where we are being asked to encounter existence, face to face, if you will. It can be an astounding business if one is intuitively wired for it.

Seeing as is also called seeing an aspect. The best known example is the duck-rabbit. He does not think we first interpret it and then see it one way or the other, we simply see it as a duck or a rabbit.
Further, we can see it first one way and then the other.

Perception is not simple passive reception. There is a connection between perception and conception.

What is at issue is not some visual peculiarity, but the way we look at things and seeing connections. To see connections is not to make connections.

This is a topic that has gained a lot of interest. — Fooloso4

What does one do with the elephant in the room, the "that which is seen" actuality? I mean, seeing as can be understood as taking the object before you "as" such that the qualia or, as Dennett put it, the phenomenon (sense impression sans the concept. See his argument about qualia) is not to be acknowledged at all, for all of the understanding's ability is bound up with the way a thing is taken up. In other words, because language is an essential part of an object's construction, what do we do with the obvious (I say) ability one has to, in the language constructed contextualized event, "understand" the what-is-not a concept as such? There is Kierkegaard's objection to Hegel in this, which is that Hegel talks about, spins arguments about, things as if they were inherently logical, but clearly, the actual is qualitatively different from the language: This pain in my knee is not language, even though language is what brings this pain to "light".

Does thinking take place in the human brain? — Alkis Piskas

Begs the question: Where is a human brain? If thinking "takes place" in it, it must be somewhere, but to be somehere presupposes meaningful spatial designations and these are groundless, every one, in the final determination. AFter all, a concept is only as good as its meaningful, explanatory underpinning. If there is no underpinning, then the concept loses its meaning. A spatial concept like, under the bed presupposes a "where" such that something can be under relative to it. But this "where", it too must be spatially determined, and this in turn the same, and so on. We all know where this goes: eternity, and this is wholly indeterminate.
So, at the level of philosophical assumptions, the "in the human brain" is spatially indeterminate. But this does raise the quesiton of infinity's indeterminacy. Is it? Indeterminate, that is? Why? If it is a quantitative indeterminacy, then there is no indeterminacy at all, for it is easily quantifiably divided. But this is a trivial infinity. Then there is the qualitative infinity, and all things are coextensive spatially; and thought being "in" something loses its meaning.

Are they all that different though? Science informs philosophy and philosophy informs science. I’m not talking about Einstein’s time (and neither is Rovelli, although he starts there), but about what is presupposed. And it’s this presupposition that is explored in the second part of Rovelli’s book. — Possibility

I am saying no to this: Science does not inform philosophy unless you are taking a course in the philosophy of science (which is specialized) and philosophy is not speculative science. This is a popular idea because science is very good at advancing technology. But ask Neil DeGrasse Tyson how it is that a brain can reach beyond itself to apprehend Jupiter or a light wave, and he will simply dismiss the question, or get the answer wrong, grounding it in question begging assumptions. Now analytic philosophy (which wants very much not to be wishy washy and get no respect) with its prioritizing of clarity over meaning does move along with science's emerging theories, but this simply delivers the impression that all is well at the base, while at the base there are glaring absurdities.
Continental philosophy brings light to the foundation of understanding, but, as wheels go, it deals in meaning, and meaning does not make a clear mark of its thought, because at the foundation, things lose their confidence and certainty.
Read the first several pages of Husserl's Ideas I to see where philosophy has its authentic grounding: it is aporia.

I think you’re presuming that I’m deferring to scientific methodology, but this is far from the case. I’m certainly not proposing that we ‘dismiss what is not known’. And I don’t think you can so confidently assume you know what a physicist might say (just how many interpretations of quantum theory are there?) or how all scientists think. I recognise that the terms are often different - but I’m not looking for analysis (and neither is Rovelli in his book), rather coherence. So I don’t seek to understand the primordial or profound as a reduction to ‘something’, but more as the simplest totality of existence.

My recommendation of a book (and your evaluation of its synopsis) is not wholly indicative of my position. The way I see it, Rovelli’s process of deconstructing time as we understand it leads us effectively to Wittgenstein’s eternal present: living in a world without time, consisting of interrelating events (phenomena). — Possibility

Then I would have to read the book. If Rovelli "deconstructs" time, then he dismantles the affirmations of time by revealing its associative "differing and deferring". John Caputo argues in his "Tears of Jaque Derrida" that deconstruction undermines, across the board, knowing's affirmations, and thereby reIeases the world from fixity, from the "totalizing gaze" that says, I know this, I can grasp it, fit it into systems and categories of thought. This can be an intellectual exercise, of course. But Derrida, Wittgenstein and others were very religious. It is a following through of Husserl (see those crazy French post, post moderns, like Michel Henry or Jean luc Marion), that is, existentially religious, like Kierkegaard, whom Witt adored.
I want to defend the idea that is along these lines, that the language that constructs all thought, scientific, philosophical or otherwise, is more than a system that makes logical moves out of confirmable premises. Language constructs reality, such that as one sits and watches the world go by, there is an interpretative construction of the moment that is there IN the observed event. Of course, this is my cat, but there is a more primordial understanding of its Being which is not "being a cat" at all. And this goes for subatomic particles, spectral analyses of star light and so on. One has to look first at the world that gives itself to such affairs. The "originary" world has to be understood at a level prior to, or beneath, the thick body of interpretative history that is the constitutive self that takes on the enterprise of thinking in the first place.
Deconstruction can be loosely talked about, but it should never be considered an affirmation, a positing, regardless of how contradictory this is, and it is of course, contradictory in the extreme.....or is it? I mean, It is not to say one may not affirm this or that, but that such affirmations are never definitive, and all meanings issue from a diffusion of associated ideas. Language is always "under erasure" the moment it is spoken or written.
So deconstruction puts one, Caputo says, in the ultimate skepticism as it annihilates all affirmations. This is where philosophy must go in order to be liberated from the tyrant of language. I affirm that to do so is a revelation, even, as the Buddha said, an apprehension of ultimate reality, though this really does push it, always keeping in mind that the very language that is used here is infinitely deconstructable. Ultimate??? Reality???
What can these mean?

If we do not assume a priori that we know what the order of time is, if we do not, that is, presuppose that it is the linear and universal order that we are accustomed to, Anaximander’s exhortation remains valid: we understand the world by studying change, not by studying things....We understand the world in its becoming, not in its being. — Carlo Rovelli

But of course, there is Heraclitus in this. The world as Becoming; so many are here, from Hegel to Heiedgger. Deconstruction terminates this, not because it is wrong, but because at the level of basic ideas, even "becoming" is no more than a "differing, deferential" term that is self erasing. Derrida's point is the cancelation of all presumption of knowing, of thinking that an idea somehow really has its grounding, even partially. It is not that we are getting closer to the truth with science, but that the truth is just as indeterminate as the concept Zeus or Amitabha and the Pure Land. Only here, with the termination of this presumption can philosophy find its purpose. Liberation.

His more recent book ‘Helgoland’ leads us beyond that point to the relational structure of reality. That he does this from the perspective of quantum physics demonstrates the symmetry at work here. These, for me, are checks and balances to ensure we’re on the right track. But they also suggest that assuming reduction to a singular primordial ‘something’ may be holding us back. Physicists, for the most part, are looking for the source of energy; theologians are looking for the source of quality; while philosophers are looking for the source of logic. The answer, I think, is at the intersection of all three. Where Wittgenstein defers to silence is where we must look to a broader understanding of energy and quality, beyond their logical concepts. Too many philosophers won’t venture here. — Possibility

Yes, this about assuming a singular primordial "something" is right on the mark. But this "broader understanding of energy and quality" raises the same objection: The place philosophers won't venture to go is the annihilation of theory. Derrida's is self annihilating (under erasure) and Wittgenstein's Tractatus talks at length about nonsense, as he confesses in that very work.
I take the matter beyond Derrida, I think, for he spent his days lecturing. He should have spent them liberating his own interiority from the constructions of language that occlude the Real, whatever that is.

Ok, I think I’m (almost) with you now. What you’re describing here - a system structured according to meaning, with affect at the centre and ‘God is Love’ making genuine sense - for me constitutes a six-dimensional qualitative awareness. Your expression of it here is the closest to my understanding of this that I’ve read, so thank you. It is here that I find the triadic relation of energy, quality and logic - not as linguistic concepts but as ideas - also makes the most sense. — Possibility

I can't say I understand "six-dimensional qualitative awareness" or the "triadic relation of energy, quality and logic". I suppose I need to read Rovelli.

In terms of the Kierkegaard use of the term "Eternity" Constance has made reference to, the Moment that is possible to participate in that sense is not the same as the result of stilling the mind or getting the "monkey mind to stop chattering." If time is imagined as a river, that would be letting the current carry one along to find out what not pulling the oars is like. — Valentinus

I would argue that it is exactly the same. Time is not like a river, or, the metaphor is too narrow. Read the Concept of Anxiety on Time: It is the present that subsumes the past and the future. When the knight of faith (Fear and Trembling) proceeds with daily affairs, there is recollection and their is anticipation, but these pass within the boundless eternal present. Now ask, what is it that one does in meditation? I mean essentially, putting aside the endless, and tedious, books that heap upon this simple event so much text and history, what is the matter about?: it is about a termination of the past acting as a totalitarian master over the present. This is the everydayness of living, bound to thoughts that move seamlessly to action, never raising the question that would undo it all. This is exactly what Kierkegaard's argument is in his account of sin, for this undoing opens what is closed, which is the eternal present, which is freedom, eternity, is God, the soul.
It is an existential dialectic (borrowed explicitly from Hegel to counter Hegel. See how here and elsewhere he (Unscientific Postscript, e.g.) puts Hegel under attack, but K's thinking is dialectical: his soul, body, spirit mirrors Hegel's rational schematic. Frankly, I have only been reading Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit recently, and, just as when you read Kierkegaard, you see where Sartre, Heidegger GOT their foundational ideas, so when you read Hegel you see where Kierkegaard got his. K's difference is the application of dialectics to the very personal and intimate relation to God.

With or without "Bible talk", what Kierkegaard is calling for is theological in so far that it tries to locate an individual life in the ultimate conditions of its existence. Up to the point of recognizing the limits of language in carrying out actions, the view is in step with what ↪Banno described as "meaning is doing"

But Kierkegaard still has things to discuss and wants to develop a psychology that understands what it cannot understand. I am not sure how that difference between Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard relates to the philosophy you are calling for. — Valentinus

Meaning is doing? No issue with this at all. But what is doing? A question like this takes language as an interpretative stand in for what ever is really going on. I am advocating a departure from language use, what we receive from our culture at the outset of putting opinions together, as a norm, as what tells us what to believe and how to believe it. One has to step away from normalcy itself, and this is essentially the major Kierkegaardian premise, in order to receive the world in a profound and primordial way. His knight of faith may someone who acts and speaks like an entirely normal person, but the entire edifice of her personality is underwritten by God in the here and now.
God is not Being as opposed to becoming (doing). God is simply what is not possessed by language because language cannot possess actuality.

Dogs seem to have a more qualitative sense of the world. Our verbal expressions are like promises and threats: they have qualitative value, potential and significance for Sparky. They’re not understood (I think this fits better than known) according to objects in spacetime, but according to qualitative relations of embodied experience. When you say ‘let’s go outside’, they understand quality in the ideas you’re expressing: the arrangement of shapes and sounds in “let’s go” have an immediately inviting, inclusive quality to it; while “outside” has a more distant and variable quality related to possible smells, textures and tastes. — Possibility

Threats are very basic, but promises, now that stretches witnessed behavior to a point beyond. What is a promise, essentially? One has to dismiss knowledge of the conditional form, the counter factual: promises are logically complex, for one has to be able to conceive of a broken promise, and here, there is the anticipated event that does not materialize, and there is disappointment. Clearly, anticipation is part of the promising construction, and there is no doubt dogs anticipate, just as mice and lizards do. But broken promises, or fulfilled ones, are not simply about anticipations, about my anticipating another's behavior.
But on the other hand, complexity is implcilty in everything ever said. One cannot understand an affirmation without its opposite, its "binary" associations, and so on.

As to the qualitative relations, of this there is no doubt. In fact, I think this kind of thing really binds a dog's "sense" of the world with ours. Sparky "cares" about his affairs, and this caring is part of the whole experience, intertwined inextricably with reasoned judgment. This is why he has a moral position in the world, for caring is about something of value, and this goes to the Good and Bad of the experience itself. Being scratched in the nose by a cat hurts! Like us, our reason is affectively and valuatively bound.

Very much in agreement here. I like to think of it as there being no metaphysical division between human cognition and that of lesser beings ... only a gradation of magnitude. Principles of thought such as that of identity and of noncontradiction may not be cognized by lesser animals (nor children) but all life makes use of them to the extent that life experiences and then both acts and reacts relative to that experienced. Its hard to properly justify this, though it seems self-evident to me. And this degree of cognition, of course, becomes exponentially greater in adult humans in large part due to our capacity to manipulate symbols to a vastly greater extent, with human language as the prime example, so as to further abstract from more basic concepts. At any rate, enjoyed reading your views.

As an aside, having skimmed through some of this thread, as with Alkis Piskas, I very much equate "the Word" not with human language but with Heraclitus's, and later the Stoic's, notion of logos. Heraclitus's can be confusing, but the Stoics more directly equated the logos to the Anima Mundi, the operative or animating principle of the world. Here, to keep to the previous examples, Sparky is as much of the logos as is his human caregiver ... as is anything that is part of the cosmos. I know, its a more mystical-ish reading of Genesis 1, but "In the beginning was the logos (the Anima Mundi and all it entails)" makes sense to me, whereas "in the beginning was the one linguistic term produced by some omni-this-and-that person" ... not so much. While I get we're not strung up on mythologies: — javra

Regarding Sparky, just a couple more thoughts. You seem to have a lot of respect for what (or "who") he is. I doo, too. But is he is a rational creature? What reason is, is seen only in his behavior, that is, whether he demonstrates reason in actions. Of course, this is the way of it with us as well: I know another's rational interior because of the rational behavior in speech and actions. But then, I look at the "within" of myself to observe first hand my own rationality and it does appear that the symbolic system at work is driven by the simple givenness of logic: I never can observe what logic is because I have to use logic to observe. Logic is always remote in its justificatory validity. So, I do wonder what this dog's interior is like. I think interms of affirmations and negation, yes's and no's, but while his interior cannot "say" these things internally, there is basic aversion and attraction. Nor can he say the conditional form, but he can make associations of causality. How about universal quantifiers? Does rural Sparky know all squirrels hop around in trees? I am sure he does. IN fact I think it can be shown that not just dogs, but all animals possess this capacity for formal, non verbal logic, and this can be witnessed. In the interior of Sparky's mind, however, I

The one philosophical thesis that comes to mind here is pragmatism: In the interior of experience, there is no rational faculty, no reason as such, no logical rules. We call them rules, but this is just a way of categorizing something holistic in its original presence. The entire experience is that out of which reason as a concept is abstracted, but the original whole is some unthinkable aesthetic/reason/sensible/intuitive actuality. And animals have this.

I think the question really comes down to the difference between symbolic representation and this original prelinguistic basis for rationality. This is where philosophy has always taken its cue. This latter is what we share. But this is the foundation for an elevation to higher understanding.

Heraclitus' world? I agree with this. In fact, I am sure that in the argument of Being contra Becoming,....well, there is no Being in this sense. If there is an absolute, it is an eternal becoming. But as to the divine logos, I was listening to a lecture on Hegel and it was stated that Hegel did not believe in a rationality, or logos, as it is currently conceived in this particular frame of historical progress, to be acknowledged as the be all and end all of the logos. We are just a stage of developing an emerging divinity, and this ultimate end is not to be conceived by us, here and now.
But Hegel is not a popular philosopher, nor is Zeno or Marcus Aurelius. Logos is best, in my view, handled by hermeneutics: what we acknowledge as disclosing the world to our understanding is an interpretative order of things. Now, whether this is evolving into some grand finality, is another question. But it is not reason that is front and center; it is value. Metavalue and metaethics. That is, the Good. Wittgenstein thought the Good was divinity.

Well, I don’t assume a singular progression of time as Hegel does, so for me the paradox isn’t between logic and actuality, but between the possibility of an absolute (rather than ‘perfect’) rationality and/or energy source. Is one a ‘beginning’ and the other an ‘end’, a telos? Or perhaps this is a balanced ternary logic (-, 0, +), qualitatively imagined? — Possibility

But why this absolute rationality taking center stage? Rationalism and telos is always a bankrupt idea because reason has no value, that is, a rational perfection refers to form, structure of thought only and carries no weight beyond this. Just an empty vessel, reason. It is only when something in the world is in play that purpose and meaning are brought in. This is why I insist on a qualitative "leap" into a deeper understanding of the world that philosophy can uncover. My tentative claim is that language and its logic is only pragmatically meaningful: its mission, if you will, is to realize value, and this puts the burden of meaning on aesthetics. The Good, Wittgenstein said, is what he calls divinity. He is not talking about contingent goodness, but something profound he thinks is above language. Of course, he was right and wrong about this.

Kierkegaard, on the other hand, assumes a perfectly rational singularity (God), so your jump to ethics in his relation to Hegel makes sense. Everything evolves according to Hegel, so reason in his abstraction cannot realise this eternal rationality (pure reason) that Kierkegaard assumes. Nor can it, in Kierkegaard’s subjective philosophy, ever determine the ethical rationality (practical reason) that Hegel assumes. — Possibility

You would have to tell me why you think K thinks like this. He doesn't hold those things.

Pain has a quality that directs energy away from logic and towards action. It isn’t that it has nothing to do with reason. Rather, we assume an inner logic - an embodied rationality - in order to determine a qualitative (outward) distribution of energy (as attention and effort). The way I see it, reason ranges qualitatively from pure logic to pure energy. — Possibility

This is why one has to, if the interest is in getting to the real foundation of what being a human being is about, look to what is prior to this kind of talk. Of course, not historically prior, but logically prior, something prior because it is assumed, and sits invisibly, because uninquired, at the base of all inquiry and discussion: always, already in the presuppositions of anything that can be brought up for theory and discussion. I'm talking about the foundational place of language to the world. I have been arguing that beneath anything we say there is the impossible unutterable noumena which is not outside of experience at all. Phenomena are actually noumenal entities. But what makes something noumenal? It is not that it is beyond language, but rather, only beyond language in its, to speak Hegelese, Zeitgeist, which actually reflects Kierkegaard's concept of sin. Sin (but put aside the Christian thinking here) is essentially being possessed by culture, but the manner of conceiving of sin is important: It is an existential break from something primordial. Heidegger will later dismiss K's religiousness, but move forward with this "break" saying K is right, we in our normal assimilated ways of living according to "the they" which is the thoughts that circulate so freely and dominate throughout society in the form of given institutions and ideas, are out of touch with something deeply important. He thinks there is some nonalienated original condition.
Thus, pain is, prior to being taken up in science, in evolutionary theory, in talk about energy, or "moving away from logic toward action," I am saying, given to us as a conditioned term, blunted by language's tendency bring all things down to a familiar level (they they, or das man, as Heideggger puts it). Language makes us forget, reduces the world to familar terms. We don't think this is so because we are IN this zeitgeist, and it takes philosophy to see it.

This is where philosophy has to take us if it wants foundational meanings to appear. And there is no where else philosophy wants to go.

This dualism of inner in relation to outer system is unavoidable, but the structure is highly variable. Kierkegaard’s system logically assumes God in order to describe subjectivity: qualitative judgements of affected experience. Hegel’s embodied system, on the other hand, assumes an unlimited process or source of energy (the progress of history) to describe a dialectic: manifesting past experiences of logical contradiction. With Hegel, it seems there can be no synthesis without a process of dissolving identification (thesis/antithesis), from which we then reconstruct history as a new dialectic develops. — Possibility

One has to be careful with Kierkegaard, making him sound like a rationalist. It is not that he thinks God is logically assumed, but that God is conceived as an actuality that is intimated in childhood, and realized (bringing in sin by this) later as an incompleteness that is evidenced by the calling, the existential anxiety which is realized int eh fateful moment when a person reaches self awareness and affirms this incompleteness in her existence. It is an existential dialectic, not a logical one. Of course, Hegel never thought empty logic was of any value, but to say "the real is rational" affirms God's rationality, and K will have nothing to do with this. My take on K has reason trying to deal with something entirely outside of reason because reason attempts to embody, encompass, "totalize" the world by bringing all things to heel.

I think you're right about Kierkegaard and Hegel, essentially.

Do you mean by this “knowledge by acquaintance of abstract ideas” or “propositional knowledge”. I of course agree they don’t have the latter. But, in the example I linked to, to categorize items by function and by shape demonstrates an acquaintance with abstract ideas, i.e. the awareness of concepts. Outside and inside are themselves abstract ideas addressing a relation between an enclosed space affixed to a relatively opened space and the directionality between these. But I think the example I linked to carries more weight. I by examples such as this conclude that language is not necessary for the apprehension of concepts. — javra

Or perhaps better: Language as we know it in our complex symbolic dealings in logic and math, is not qualitatively distinct from what Sparky does when retrieving toys and such. That is, when I do modus ponens, an analogous structure can be found in Sparky's mind as he singles out circles from other things. Consider a pragmatist's theory of knowledge: it is the conditional structure that is truly at the foundation of knowldge about the world, or anything else. IF I hear, see this noise, these squiggles on paper, THEN something occurs with regularity. What is nitro glycerin? The answer goes to its forward looking meaning: IF X impacts a surface of resistance Y, in a given quantity and velocity, and IF X has certain properties (all analytically reducible to if...then...epistemic terms), then X is nitro. Properties? How does one "know" a property? Through its association with a symbolic designation, like a noise (signifier), such that IF I observe properties P (that furry moving organic thing), signifier S (a phonemic noise like 'dog') "works" to carry meaning.

Anyway, I do think our complex symbolic systems are essentially pragmatic, like a dog's relatively simple "cognition". And when the dog responds to spoken words, it shows basic conditional thinking. When you say he is aware of concepts, I think this means he is pragmatically aware, and this is true of all animals, that is, aware that some X follows from some P. To say this is Pavlovian is not to diminish what he does. We are Pavlovian, too.

Interesting: language, Derrida says, is a symbolic "standing in" for something else, separating thought from the what thought is supposed to be about. I think Sparky's training is the first step toward the creation of an internal world, set apart from things.

Just some musings really.

How then do you explain a dog's ability to recognize the names of 1022 items, replete with a capacity to "categorize them according to function and shape"? Less extraordinary, border collies are notorious for knowing such things as their left from their right in herding sheep per the instructions of their caregiver. All this requires a good deal of conceptual contextualization regarding what sounds symbolize - with no language production on their part.

Heck, my own dog recognizes the difference between "go inside" and "go outside", be this the house, a specific room, or the car. A very abstract idea that is very relative to context. And this without any formal training; hence, no formal punishment and reward. — javra

You know, that is a very good point. So a well trained dog cannot, I think we can agree, produce an internal dialog. Sparky can't think, "Well, Jane is sleeping and I wish she would get up and put some food in the bowl. It was the same last week, I mean why own a dog if you're not going to......" There is no concept of time and space, no prepositional constructions, no conditional, negations that can be explicitly spoken internally. But: they do have familiarity that reaches conscious awareness; but then again, do they? When you say, "Let's go outside" does outside mean outside, or is it just a Pavlovian reaction? Of course, they feel good in this activity, bad in that one and they do make the connection between verbal noises and activities, they can anticipate. But is this knowledge?
Depends on what you mean by the term, of course. We say Sparky knows this and that, but we are being loose with this epistemic term. Safe to say, Sparky has no conceptual knowledge. But perhaps he has, and I suspect this si true, some kind of proto linguistic grasp of things. We have the conditional propositional form, and Sparky certainly follows events following other events.

The matter of agency in The Concept of Anxiety requires the Single Individual to become responsible for what happens that thrusts them into the immediacy of their decisions as actual events.
The encounter is outside the bounds of the psychology we use to understand experience. — Valentinus

Yes. The freedom one experiences requires a transformation of elevated consciousness, which brings sin into the world, for prior to the positing of spirit, one is not capable of sin. Of course, K rejects the rather common Lutheran notion of original sin as some horrible, unspeakable transgression committed by Adam (see the Smallcald articles that K refers to). He gives an existential, that is, phenomenologically descriptive account of why it is we are born to suffer and die. It is rooted in Augustine: it is our alienation from God, the absence of God in our affairs, and this absence is there, in the analysis of time, for to be more this world's than God's is exactly what it is to devoted to culture and its indulgences, which are inherited and possessed in recollection, what K thought "Christendom" encouraged.

Kierkegaard can be, of course, off putting with his Bible talk, but The Concept of Anxiety is a cornerstone of existential thought in its temporal analysis of freedom. It altogether bypasses the principle of sufficient cause as a refutation to freedom.What I want to say is that when I stand before my future in full sight of my possibilities, I stand apart of what would spontaneously set me to action, and in this no cause possesses me. Now this crossroads of will and sufficient cause cannot conclude in a violation of causality, because this principle is intuitively inviolable. But as I see it, this is not the point. The point is, when you make this qualitative leap from spontaneous action to deliberative action at the philosophical level, where the totality of existence is brought to a stand still, that is, you stand not simply before this or that possibility in some categorical determination, but before all possibilities, before Being itself, you suspend all that makes this world the familiar place that it is, and Inquiry has no possibiities before it, for there is only the eternal present, free of decision making. K calls the one can do this a knight of faith. For me, it is an extraordinary event, to stand before Being as such and make the world stand still. This is where philosophy is supposed to take us.

This should sound familiar, because it is something Eastern mysticism has been talking about for centuries.

My dog definitely understands "no." — Hanover

A thought: no, your dog does not understand "no". Understanding what another says means there is agreement between both parties, and a dog's received meaning has no conceptual contextualization. Humans say this word, and the prohibition is wrapped a body of associated thought. Not so with Rover. Rovers "no" does not register symbolically because she has no language. She does have, you could argue, associated experiences that make the "no" familiar and is conditionally connected to punishment and reward, the same as us. But "to understand" the word, well, dogs don't have words.

↪Valentinus Seems to me to be the same point. All talk occurs within language games; all language games are embed in -constitute - the world, what can be said. Constance is puzzling over ways to talk about the world without using language. You can't. But you might act in the world - do something; paint a picture, demonstrate a kindness, make a sacrifice. — Banno

Just to make clear: the rabbit out of the hat is not a world without language, but a world through language making itself and its alinguistic content appear. Language is the house of Being (a great philosopher once said), but as language brings being to light, there is that-which-is-being-brought-to-light. We receive this in interpretative language, but language does not have fixity in this; it is malleable, expendable, not rigid or dogmatic because the world holds it there. Language is open. I am saying in this openness, the question (the piety of thought), the second order reflection, inserts an aporia, and here one is freedom. Now, freedom to do, to see what? that is the question.

What proposition, exactly? — Banno

"I am tasting an oyster," for one. There is, in this event, a great deal of language involved, though it is not explicitly exercised in the actual tasting event. When I walk out in the morning and see all around me as familiar, the trees and hills, etc., if I were, say, a feral child all grown up sitting on a limb like Tarzan, things would still be familiar, and I might even be able to wonder existentially in some simple way, but how far could this go having no schooling, no language modelled around me giving definition to things? It is language articulates the world in symbols and makes inquiry and logic accessible. Language is the essence of thought itself. I imagine Tarzan would be more like a beast of the jungle than a king.

So, as I taste something, I know I am tasting it, and the tasting event emerges out of a matrix of language that has already established a working understanding. Right there, behind the tasting, if you will, there are "regions" of language possibilities waiting for context to "speak" that is, give meaning to, the occasion.

So you are saying that the cat being on the mat is one thing, the proposition "the cat is on the mat", a different thing? And yet "the cat is on the mat" is true only if the cat is on the mat.

Of course the world is always, already interpreted. Your reaching for, talk of, an uninterpreted world is a conceptual mistake. — Banno

No, I'm not saying that either. I am saying something that is frankly radical, but true. Observe the cat. In this observation there is a conceptual counterpart to the "presence" of what is there, and by presence I refer to what is not spoken, or speakable. Moore called ethics a matter, at the level of metaethics, of a non natural property. He was referring to, if you will, the qualia of pain and pleasure (and internal prohibition and valuation) Think, as Kierkegaard did, of the actuality over there on the sofa like this: in the broadest sense, it is an actuality that is qualitatively NOT a cognitive presence as an actuality. We, says Wittgenstein, bring meaning (and ethics and aesthetics) into the world, and take up the whatever it is there on t he couch as a cat, that way we can anticipate it when we see it, "know" about its possibilities, etc. This is what a thought is, a forward looking apprehension. BUT: the moment of apprehension is seized by knowledge in the forward looking event. If knowledge, this forward looking affair, can be put down, like a Buddhist or a Hindu puts down experience in deep meditation, or, via jnana yoga (philosophy), the world becomes a revelation--something altogether new comes to light.

It is a conceptual mistake, and I agree, as do many others, but it is not an existential mistake. This goes right to the point: conceptual mistakes belong to a body of judgment and error that is deliberately being opposed. The argument speaks for itself, but the "soundness" depends on the world and the way it presents itself. These concepts we are supposed to abide by come to us with foundational biases that have to be identified. Deconstruction, e.g., is part of this.

I really wonder why haven't they translated the Greek quote at least as "In the beginning was the Reason" ... This would have saved us a lot of time in discussing it! — Alkis Piskas

Take a look at my later comments. I try to go more into the issues you raise. ) I wrote them this morning not having read this post of yours here.)

So you want to do philosophy of language, but vaguely back it up and give it a sense of authority with references to the Bible (and other assorted scriptures)? — baker

This about the Bible: I have a lot of respect for what you could call primitive authentic experience. Ideas so full of nonsense, yet they are closer to the foundation of something deeply important.
Authority with references to the Bible? Really, it's the other way around: philosophy brings analytic clarity to obscure thinking. What kind of authority did you have in mind?

What else could it be?
Definition of "speech" by Oxford LEXICO: "The expression of or the ability to express thoughts and feelings by articulate sounds." Aren't sounds material? — Alkis Piskas

But is a concept material? But then, what do I mean by material? Material is at the basic level supposed be the most inclusive term, including pots and pans and abstract thought in mathematics. The idea is that there is this ontology that concludes all of this, but the problem is that there are obvious apparent differences and a term like material is borrowed from the pots and pans contexts of use and extended to include all things? Sure, saying a word, using lips and larynx and the rest is material, as a classificatory term, but ideas, logic, language and meaning, and so forth, these do not fit the category, and for obvious reasons. We want to say all things are one, perhaps, but this one is not materiality, because this would be a violation of the boundaries of the appearances upon which out concepts are drawn. My pen is material, but a thought? It has no feel to is, no weight, no visibility and so on. But these are the defining marks of material, are they?

No, I din't say that. I only said the "Word" ("logos") as "speech" doesn't make sense in ths famous Christian quote and I just tried to give a better explanation by considering the meaning that word "logos" acquired with time, and that was "reason" ("logiki"). This is much more plausible since reason is beyond any borders imposed by languages (speech), religions and civilizations. And this because its nature is mental, spiritual and not material. The expression "conscious thought" which you are using is very close to it. The word "Consciousness" that I used, is also very closely connected to "Thought". — Alkis Piskas

I see. So instead of "in the beginning the was the word" is should be "there was reason"; but I thought you had an objection due to words not being sufficiently liberated from the vulgarity of physicality, as if God had vocal chords. Anyway, I would certainly agree that God is not like a person vocalizing the world into existence. It's just that the word 'word' I never took to be this physical event. I equate word with a meaning and its logic. Instead of logos, which sounds more like a reference to principles and laws of logic that are universal, I look at meaning, which is inclusive of affect as well as cognition. This is the original affair that sits before me prior to the analytical separation. There is no separation in base line experience: I think, feel, concern, care all in the single event. Analysis reveals what it is, the what is it does not thereby become a body of analytical pasts. It remains whole. (This is one way to talk about a complaint against rationalism existentialists have.).
Consciousness, I agree, is closely connected to thought. But more that this: it IS thought. I tend to think like this: When we talk about consciousness, it is an ontological matter, as consciousness Is the ISness of my egoic presence, call it a transcendental ego. But to talk about this sans thought, reflection, reason, affect, mood, and so on, is to reduce consciousness to a pot or a pan or a star cluster, a mere presence before my eyes sort of thing. But clearly consciuosness never comes before one's eyes, so this classification is simply off the table. And since our notion of things are evidenced only by the way they appear, and consciousness never makes an appearance (like this) it is entirely wrong minded to infer from object appearance's concept of Being or Reality, to that if a consciousness.

Yet, as plausible as this "version" may be, I cannot claim anything more about it, since I have not has any realization about Consciousness being "the beginning of all things" as you say. A lot of thinkers calim or believe that, though. — Alkis Piskas

The beginning of all things in my thinking here has to do not with some temporal order, but outside ot a temporal order, in the here and now. How is this possible? It gets very weird, frankly. One has to make a critical step out of familiar thinking. But look: putting all texts in abeyance, at least explicitly, observe the world before you, and there are tables, chairs, a computer and so on. My view (constructed out of readings) begins with the question what is it that lies before me? And, how do I know these things? Ontology and epistemology. I know them in time, or better, they are constructed or made out of time, for these are presented to me as events in which memory is called up to identify. Thus, this present is made of the past, to put it bluntly. But I am trying to acknowledge the present thing there before me, so how do I get to the present when the past is the very essence of "knowing" it is there at all?

Such is the dilemma. I claim that the "metaphysics of the present" is a real possiblity. This claim goes against most others. They are mistaken. They don't indulge the aesthetics of the real enough; such is the bane of the intellectual philosopher, so busy constructing thought, it isn't meaningful to think that the point is to dismantle thought. How does one dismantle thought? This is philosophy's job: make the eternal present a real event by undercutting memory's hold on the present via inquiry at the level of basic assumptions.

Some games invoke the modification of their own rules. That's not necessarily a termination. — Banno

True, and such it is with being a person. To put it in Rorty's terms, vocabularies are open, waiting to be recast. But again, I say, much in opposition of Rorty and others, not that there is a final vocabulary (bad metaphysics) there are higher vocabularies, and I don't mean just higher as more inclusive; I mean more profound, and yes, that there is such a thing as what you could call existential profundity. It is why religion is so full of cliches like "the power and the glory"--a lot of metaphysical hogwash, but mixed with something else that is certainly not howash.

Interesting that you read ‘an infinite source of energy’ as ‘eternity’. The finitude/infinity of energy is the paradoxical quality of time, and the qualitative flow of energy is time’s directional logic. Have you read Rovelli’s ‘The Order of Time’? — Possibility

But the issue here has nothing to do with Rovelli or physics. Philosophy is not physics, nor is it abstract speculation. Think of eternity, for example, but withdraw from assumptions that are in place in the everydayness of affairs (of which science is an extension) and move into a more basic analysis, which is the structure of experience itself. The issue of time is fundamentally different, for time at this level is what is presupposed in talk about Einstein's time. Has nothing to do with physicists being wring and phenomenologists right; rather, these are modes of inquiry radically different from one another.

Yes, there is not just this possible prediction, but also its negation - the impossibility of it all. You’re presuming a ‘perceptual event’ has form: a definable quality to be changed. But any perceptual event is qualitatively variable in itself - it manifests variable observation events according to a predictive relation, but it’s also variably perceivable as such. So it isn’t so much change as a vague awareness of variability - on the periphery of any capacity for perception. That either draws attention and effort (affect), or not. It’s not undeniable - it comes down to an availability of energ — Possibility

Where you go wrong here is in "vague awareness of variability". One has to pull away from any particular categories of disciplined thinking, whether it is be science of knitting, and withdraw one's attention altogether. Of course, this kind act is usually cognitive, and here, in the idea I am defending, this is true as well, as it is a movement from the particular to the general. E.g., I withdraw from one taxonomic classification to a higher one, and there is no qualitative existential change, only different vocabularies come into to play while others dismissed. Look at the entire enterprise of thought this way, and while certainly qualitative changes are there, in the practice, in the subject matter, after all, biology is not pottery, but the understanding remains steady in the familiar way of things, and when some Kuhnsian paradigm shift does occur, it is MOSTLY assimilative, having to make revolutionary changes out of the normal science's established systems. Where does Quantum physics get its terminology? It is borrowed from existing vocabulary, and modified using metaphorical extensions. The new is always an assimilation of an existing totality (to borrow a term form Levinas, Heidegger, et al).
This provides a working concept to proceed here: Philosophy, I am claiming, is where thought goes when the world exceeds all paradigmatic categories. Heidegger wrote Being and Time just to go here, to the place where thinking meets its terminal point and explanations run out. But (and this is a crucial idea) instead of thinking like a scientist and dismiss what is not known as something always coming, waiting to but constructed conceptually, theoretically, which is an essential part of Heidegger, where Heidegger looks for some primordial language that has been occluded by centuries of bad metaphysics, I claim the reduction to something primordial and profound lies in Wittgenstein;s eternal present. Put Rovelli aside, pick up Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety.

Again, NOT at all that Rovelli (I read a synopsis) is in any way wrong, but the terms of analysis are very different. Time, its past, present and future, are here features of the experience that is already in place antecedent to what a physicist might say. (Einstein knew this. He read Kant when very young. He just knew he wasn't going to take on philosophical issues).

My point here is that at this intersection we must embody energy, logic, quality, or some combination, in order to relate to anything at all. You agree that any quest for an unlimited source of energy is one of identity: it assumes that everything has a proper, definitive relation to everything else, and if we somehow manage to complete this process of identification, then the source must reveal itself. It’s an issue for ethics because to do this we assume that our perspective embodies a proper, definitive relation to everything else. — Possibility

Yes and no. No, because this definitive relation is never definitive. All of our concepts are open, evidenced by what happens when you chase down meanings, which is what deconstructionists do, and can sound childlike doing it: What is a bank teller? What is money? What is economics, and so on, and so on. Then, what is a person? What is this, that, and questions are not simply playful antagomisms, but are indicative of the indeterminacy of language (something Willard Quine famously wrote about; and he hated deconstruction...while agreeing!) Concepts are, all of them, open. So what happens, I ask here, when the broadest concept imaginable, Being, stands in openness? THIS is an extraordinary event, to allow the entire conceptual edifice to be "suspended". My claim is that if this is done faithfully, allowing openness its full due, then the world qualitatively changes, for there is no longer any conceptual recourse, no body language into which one can retreat, no "totality" that can subsume all things, for one has breached into eternity.

Energy? Why not shakti, or Brahman? Or thathata? Of course, these terms have different meanings, all of them, but note something important: When Hindus and Buddhists use vocabulary like this, they are understanding the world as it appears, mixed with thought and affect; cognition is not separated from these and objects in the world. How does one privilege ideas in a system like this? According to meaning, and affect is no longer a marginalized phenomenon. It takes center stage in ontology. And saying something like God is Love no longer is just a romantic foolishness.

Possibility/impossibility points to the quality or diversity of the idea(l) - what do you think logic constructs its concepts out of? Itself? And construction requires a source of energy. Perfect relation is paradox, because nothing else is necessary. And if this paradox exists, then any and all of them do. — Possibility

The paradox you mention is between logic and the actuality. If you go by Hegel, then the real's rational nature is only imperfectly realized in our current Zeit Geist: it approaches perfection in God's self realization, and because we see only as our unevolved reason permits, contradictions rise up. But all this is awaiting so sort of divine completion in which contradictions fall away. So, all relations do have the stamp of paradox, for one can easily find contradictions everywhere since knowledge falls apart with inquiry at the basic level. This is what, by Hegel's standard, contingency is all about: the imperfection of realizing God's perfect rationality.
Hegel was essentially on your side because he agreed that reaosn in the abstract had no great value. Kant's pure reason is not very important here. What is important is the way reason grapples with what is given, making science what it is. Hegel doesn't separate things from reason: they are parts of the same grand disclosure of Truth in God.
I think Hegel is interesting. Continental philosophers take him seriously (though not as he would like); analytic philosophers don't talk about him except in philosophy history classes. You have to go through Kierkegaard: reason and objects are qualitatively completely different. To me this goes directly to ethics: That pain in your side where you were assaulted with a baseball bat: THIS is rational?? No. It has nothing to do with reason.

We can either deconstruct to achieve insight, or construct a big picture consistent with science and physics which I prefer to do. And when I do I find it is all about the evolution of forms. These forms are all self organizing, and they are made of endlessly variable informational structure. So really, everything can be reduced to the self organization of information. We know what information is - the evolutionary interaction of form, but we don't know what self organization is. We know self organization is what creates order in the universe, from which structure and life evolves.

When I consider this issue, I find that if I say self organization is caused by God, or physics, or the anthropic principle, etc. I do not change what it is, but I change myself. I limit my ability to experience reality. It becomes something like Wit's word game, or as I prefer to call it information game. Ultimately this becomes a process of information, where what occurs is an interaction of forms. :smile: So we cannot escape the fact that everything is information, because everything is information from every perspective.

So it makes sense to me not to define the source of self organization, rather to call it consciousness, and this way there is consciousness and information in its many forms. This way I do not limit my ability to experience reality, and in this knowledge I also learn to respect the various forms of reality of others. — Pop

Not sure what you mean when you state at the beginning that you are not interested in insight, so I am reluctant to bring in a response to the rest. After all, philosophy without the pursuit of insight is like a wheel without a carriage.

I believe the world has bad and good elements. Just like God, or the universe, or whatever, it's just the essence of reality — Gregory

Well, sure. I would bring in certain analyses that divides the playing field to make it more enlightening. I mean, you suggest that these terms are somehow equalized by their being in the world, and being differently regarded, and this difference equalizes; which may be true if the matter is handled with an eye on just utility. God is a useful term, used to wipe out civilizations or to bring solace to suffering.
But if one desires to know things at a level of basic questions, doors are opened that are otherwise closed.
I argue that the more one gives the world analysis at the basic level, the more basic level assumptions falter, and this leads to something revelatory, something by the standards of utility is really beyond charted territory.

Well, that's not what I would have supposed, although care is needed here. Russell commented that "Mr Wittgenstein manages to say a good deal about what cannot be said". Much of the Investigations, and also of On Certainty, touches on this topic, which his biographers agree was for him or the highest importance. Wittgenstein's enterprise is targeted at the enterprise of scientism; for him what is of the greatest import is what is unsaid. — Banno

But he is he uncompromising in the matter of discussing what is not to be discussed. He would turn his chair, e.g., to face the wall when the attempt to discuss the foundations of ethics (metaethics) came up. Then see his Lecture on Ethics as well as the Tractatus: No doubt, Witt takes God and religion very seriously (in his notebooks: What is Good is Divine too. That, strangely enough, sums up my ethics.).

My issue lies with his insistence not to talk about the matter, or better, not to talk "around" it, elucidating the periphery, the region where words make partial, even nebulous and obscure, intrusions into the place where familiarity loses its grip.
Language games, I am sure, is derivative of Dewey and the pragmatists and Heidegger, all who came before Philosophical Investigations, and for whom categorical thinking was dismissed in favor of a more fundamental analysis, which is pragmatism, essentially. This is the way I see it: Pragmatism is one of the most defining insights in philosophy of the past century (that I have read. I don't read much analytic philosophy, though. I read Quine and found his Radical Indeterminacy. Indeterminacy in language is a principle theme in post modern thought and Quine and Derrida were saying very similar things, differently).
Any way, there is nothing I can see in Witt that makes the extraordinary qualitative move into discussion about the kind of existential threshold indeterminacy I want to defend.

I taste oysters only with my tongue, and hence I never taste oysters as they really are.

As if this meant one never tastes oysters.

SO there's the problem with the OP. If you adhere to Stove's Gem, if you never taste oysters, of course you can't recognise the beginning.

The alternative is to recognise that you do taste the oysters. The noumenal is a misleading nonsense. — Banno

No, no, no...That's not it. It is certainly not the case that I do not taste oysters when I taste oysters. But point here to see that the tasting is one thing, the proposition is another. The latter is an interpretation of the affair before you. So, if the matter is contextualized such that talk about oysters and how they taste makes sense, then you have a seamless (roughly) contingent account using the familiar vocabulary. But take the matter to the order of philosophical inquiry, THEN interpretations change, and here, since we are in the throes of what I call "good metaphysics" contextual conditions become very different, extraordinary. The tasting, and even the propositional counterpart, become subsumed under the metaphysics, and the metaphysics is not merely a dialectical spinning of wheels: it is real, in the encounter.

The elephant as you've described it here is the phenomena, not the noumena. If not, how do you distinguish the phenomenal and noumenal? — Hanover

Well, you have touched on the very point: Kant was wrong to make this prohibitive distinction. The noumenal is the most inclusive concept imaginable, and this present moment of p henomenological plenum is inherently noumenal; we just don't see it this way because we are too, well, busy. It's philosophy's job to undercut all this by asking foundational questions. It is a destructive enterprise. As to what noumena is when one finally realizes it is there, in the touch, the sights and so on of the phenomenal world, this is presently out of bounds to our concepts, NOT because the world is different from reason (which it is), but because language is a shared exchange of meaning, and this, call it mystical engagement, has not been collectively realized. This, however, in no way diminishes what it is.

Now, "In the beginning was the Word" never made sense to me since the first time I heard it in school. It still doesn't, if I connect "Word" to and with the meaning of speech. If you echange the words, the saying becomes: "In the beginning was Speech". (Not as elegant, of course, but it shows the point.) It certainly doesn't make sense. Yet, Jews and Christians managed to keep alive this meaning with all sorts of explanations, the most important of which are that God created the world by (the power of) his word, that God's Word became flesh (Christ being that Word), etc. Still, all that doesn't make much sense, does it? Instead, I believe that logic and reasoning (the second meaning of "logos") make much more sense ... "In the beginning was Reason". This can be easily extended to mean "Consciousness", something which a lot of thinkers today consider as governing the Universe. "Consciousness" has no language, no face, no location and not time. — Alkis Piskas

Is speech material? Anyway, so you think conscious thought and its reason was there in the beginning of all things? As if God were a rational being who set out to create something? You take issue with the Word, but I think few take this literally. It is more about what you think: in the beginning was the rational creator who fashioned all things according to a rational plan, and so forth. But you know there are terrible flaws in this reasoning: You have to deal with Kierkegaard who argues against this Hegelian view by pointing out that the world of actuality bears nothing of the rationality that is supposed to be its defining feature. The stuff of things is qualittively different from reason. And the ethics of this world, grounded in being kicked around by viruses and other diseases, and all the lovely torments we know so well, as well as the joys indulgences: this has nothing at all that is rational about it. Falling in love is not a rational affair. Of course, you are saying that God's (just a place holder term, really) reason is not apparent to us, but then there is the matter of following the bread crumbs of life: one begins with the world, and infers from it what is the case metaphysically (in order for metaphysics to be at least prima facie adequate). And this world/creation is not rational. WE are rational, and WE are ethical. Then God created US?? But where is there evidence for something like this?
I don't buy into creation myths at all. But you do say consciousness has no language, location or time. No language? Language is logic and meaning. No language, no logos, for language is the bearer of logos, the evidence for positing logos that comes before us giving rise to inquiry at all. So you can't say outside of language. TIme? But it takes time to utter this, and time to conceive at all. How is reason and logic supposed to be outside of this necessary condition? Location? Same objection.

How do you remember what you can't put into words? — frank

Interesting question. First, an animal can remember without words. Second, I think for us, the words are there and provide a backdrop of remembering, as with all those familiar affairs, but if something novel occurs, it finds its place first within this backdrop, but if it it is truly novel, a new paradigm is needed. If God started appearing here and there as an intuitive and undeniable presence, we would not leave language to make this affirmation; rather we would assimilate the experience, but IN this assimilation, God would remain God, like a new color (as unimaginable as this is) would remain what it is, but would be understood contextualized in the usual way.

Occam's Razor is god? — Banno

Not so much the efficiency of reasoning as the simplicity of encounter. One is not simply cutting out what is not required to explain X; one is rather asking more originary questions. You might say it is Occam's Razor at the level of basic questions, such that the superfluous premise becomes the presumption of speaking/writing at all. Occam's Razor is about an explicit act in theorizing, but it can never, ever be rid of the foundation of thought that makes thought itself possible. The best one can do here is allow philosophy to do its work, which is the destruction of assumptions that are implicitly at work defining the world at the basic level.

Wittgenstein proceeded beyond this; as if the Tractatus were his final word. He subsequently showed the limitations of his view in the Tractatus, showing "the nature of logic" in terms of following and going against rules.

And he had much to say about the identification of simples. What is to count as a simple depends on what one is doing. There's a deep tendency for folk to choose this or that to be the ultimate simple - Logos, information, dialectic (@Pop); but any such choice will be relative to this or that activity - that language game.

So answering the question "what was at the beginning..." - the beginning of what? That'll tell us what game we are playing. — Banno

But Witt never thought that language had a place in giving expression to those spooky, mystical, threshold experiences one encounters that yield meaning without perfect clarity. By his standard, he was simply avoiding vacuous thinking. By mine, he set a standard that explicitly denied talk about the most interesting things about being human. Take a problematic term like "ultimate reality". You find this in the Pali Canon in the Abhiidhamma. Wittgenstein said that such terms make no sense, that they are logically impossible terms because even a word like reality, this absolute that is all inclusive, has no possibility of an alternative, an opposite, and terms make no sense if their opposite cannot be conceived (one cannot conceive of an up with out a down, e.g.). But then, there is this awkward intuition that does not listen to logical objections like this, nor does it refute them. Rather, it is IN the indeterminacy that language must deal, elucidate, elaborate, and so on.
Hence, my thoughts on Witt. regarding tis matter. The "game" is certainly afoot, but the point I am making is this: language games are open is the sense that interplay is indeterminate, endlessly reinventing (the world, Rorty and his pragmatist predecessors say, is made, not discovered); but I am claiming there is something that is NOT a game at all in the middle of all this, which is intimated when the game is intentionally, if partially, terminated, yet inquiry moves forward.

Heidegger thought the Buddhists were on to something. I think he was right.

The relationship of one part to another, is where logical structure begins. This is the beginning of knowledge. Knowledge is related and integrated, and is progressively built upon, such that any subsequent structure ( added understanding ) has to fit existing logical structure, as per constructivism. So, things understood tomorrow have to be understood in terms of today's understanding. So, it is a building onto current understanding. — Pop

I don't take issue with this at all. In fact, it is the kind of thing Derrida makes a big deal out of: after all, if (following Saussure) relationships is the kind of thing knowledge IS, then this makes knowledge indeterminate, for the relationship is not direct, but diffuse among that which is not posited but is in relation to what is posited, and the relation itself becomes a part of positing. Nothing singular can stand out, ever. Logical structure refers not to the form of knowledge but the content, and affirmations, say, scientific ones, hold their place only because they await sufficient cause, that is, dialectic opposition, to change. This is Kuhn, or close to what he says in Structures of Scientific Revolutions.
Rorty loved Kuhn, and Rorty helped me confirm some basic ideas. His trouble was that when he got to that threshold where he knew knowledge did not cling to the object, had no ontological claim to the "what" of the thing, he did what all goo d intellectuals do: he dismissed all non intellectual alternatives. Never occurred to him (that I have read) that deconstruction really meant destruction to achieve insight. Can't imagine his type "sitting quietly, doing nothing", but then, this is what I privilege over all esle, for it opens the door to, well, sheer openness, which is where philosophy is directing us.

The word God means moral perfection and innocence. Such a state seems impossible for humans and for a necessary being, although not for a lower "god". There cannot be a being of Pure Act because virtues are divided up between ones a being can have by nature and ones that require the eye of the tiger to obtain. There might be a being of infinite innocence but it couldn't have the maximum of courage if it was always in a blissful changeless state "rolling around heaven all day". Again, there is innocence and acquired goods, childhood-natural goods and goods that must be performed. So are there wizards and a pantheon? Are these who "aliens" really are? It's not bad to think so. I listen to a lot of traditional religious music and connect with the mystical ethos of it. But all this talk of the world coming from a language, whether it be of Genesis or an Om, goes back to the paternal Pure Act being of traditional religion who in reality can't represent all reality because some goods in reality must be experienced in order to partake of. — Gregory

i will put aside much of this. Sorry, because people who think like this are often very good people; I just take issue with what I call bad metaphysics. I would put attention to the interesting parts. For example, moral perfection and innocence? Infinite innocence? Here is a problem: infinite innocence, or, pure innocence. This idea suggests one can do no wrong because one IS a perfectly good will. Being a perfectly good will does not guarantee perfect actions since perfect actions are actions in the world, and all that is in the world is contingent, and knowledge of the world is requisite for action. To know the world is to know all about ethical entanglements, their complexities and the institutions of culture and language that make them so, and this is the very essence of what is NOT pure innocence. A purely innocent person is like a child, full of joy and spontaneity, but really not challenged in the ways of intersubjective thinking.
Then this talk a "paternal Pure Act". I frankly don't like the paternal part, but I do like the idea that "some goods in reality must be experienced". But what IS this Good that needs to be experienced? You can say it is a good of divinity, but then, what is there in the world that suggests divinity? It really does come down to this: We make claims, assertions, but the validity of these depends on the world having something that "says" this. The world must speak first! to warrant any claim at all. What is there, I ask, in the world, that gives warrant to this "Goodness"?

A speculative thinker who is almost unreadable and readily misinterpreted is unlikely to help. How about one of the numerous physicists writing on the subject? — Tom Storm

But these comments are altogether vague. My experience tells me you haven't read Heidegger at all. Physics presupposes exactly what needs to be examined, therefore, they say little or nothing of philosophical interest.

Conclusion: Unfortunately, the statement "In the beginning was the Word", wherever it comes from, has no value for me as interpreted by the Bible and the majority of the Jewish and Christian people. — Alkis Piskas

I tend to agree with a lot of what you say, the gist being that talk about "the word" really should be taken as a way to describe God's creation of the world, or, the foundations of existence, and so on. This is an absurd presumption of language and a testament to the boundless need we have to bring things under our control. It is on this point I would begin a response. While this anthropomorphic tendency certain does lead to absurd thinking, it is important to observe that the anthropomorphic presence is also presence of what is not anthropomorphic at all, for to see that this cup on the table is a "worded" situation, that is, I think about the cup, the table, "being on" something, and so on, even if I don't explicitly say this on recognition. And when I look up and behold all things, there is the stamp of logic and language all over it; it is what makes the world familiar to the understanding for us (not so much animals, and this is an interesting point for another time).

Any presence that comes before a person is a thoughtful presence, otherwise it is not a presence at all, as in an infants mind blooming and buzzing, there is no presence of anything until singularities are carved out of the world via language (the notion of mere familiarity and language being joined at the hip is an interesting one). So, when it comes to something being at all, we are deep in language, the word. The foundational analysis of existence must be about the language that separates, individualizes and carves out meaning out of "difference".

When the issue of God and creation and the beginning of all things, one way to think of this is to respect that language brings "the world" into being qui9te literally. Now, what is beyond language is another matter, but it needs to be approached not as a distant metaphysical impossibility, but a very close, intimate one: after all, the language in question is all over the place, there, when I awaken in the morning in eerything.

My thinking is that we need to allow the term beginning loses its value here altogether, just as you say, but this must be done in the intimacy of the actual encounter with the world, not with an understanding historical metaphysics of the Bible and Jewish metaphysics (though this latter brings to mind things I know little of, but have gathered some through Levinas and Buber and other who live in two worlds, really, philosophy and religion. If you have something interesting to read on this, let me know).

You're referencing sort of a raw data feed that enters your brain, unprocessed at all by reason. It's a hyper-empiricism, devoid of rational organization within the mind. Was this not part of Kant's project in responding to Hume? That is, we can't see the causation when one billiard ball hits the other, so our mind imposes it, which is no different than all the other things our mind imposes on the world in order to understand it, whether that be space, time, or other sorts of things?

The immediate sense impression you reference doesn't make sense to me because it would necessarily be mediated in some way. That mediation isn't limited to sense organs, but by reason itself, which is in fact impacted by language.

So explain to me the elephant just as it is, unmediated by sensory organs or reason. How could that ever be done - the pure unadulterated elephant? — Hanover

Take Kant's position, and there you are , this noumenal entity whose very thought structure prohibits access to the noumenal eternity that is the metaphysical setting for, well, where we really are, and what we really are; but you absolutely cannot speak of this, understand this, because it is beyond the categories of thought, as well as space and time. By this account, you night as well just sit back, try to be a good person via the categorical imperative, and drop all pretentions of making sense out of this metaphysics.
My claim (borrowed, put together) is that this conception can only lead to one conclusion: that cat on the sofa is really not a cat on a sofa at all, but I cannot see this because I understand the world only through my cognitive and sensory limitations ( and , I should add, you get the same conclusion with the materialist's assumption that all we actually perceive is the inside of a brain). But consider: the very noumena that is supposed to be utterly hands off to the understanding cannot be exclusive in any way: it is the transcendental whole, all inclusive, and this include the this obsevable world. Finitude and infinity are not mutually exclusive; rather the latter must subsume the former, and this means my perception of the cat being on the sofa is no less noumenal than that which is supposed to be beyond the threshold of Kantian epistemology.
The elephant in t he room is this "presence" that is noumenal that is right there IN the empirical event unfolding before my eyes and mind. Looking for eternity, divinity, the absolute is therefore a matter of destruction of the conceptual dynamics that keep this extraordinary apprehension at bay.
Real meditation is destructive.

And this insight is not from a transcendent vantage point? — frank

A most revealing question: How is it that within logic, we can acknowledge logic's limitation in a way that is non trivial, non abstract? We see delimitations all the time, but these are contingent, that is, set up by equational details, but to question logic itself is not to deny logic, which is impossible, a performative contradiction, but to set oneself apart (Dosteovsky: Am I a piano key?) from it, for logic does not come to us as an empty form, but full of the language and culture that makes a claim on belief, sets the terms of engagement in the world. It is not the logic, but the world and its institution (Kierkegaard's sense of original sin) that occlude something "Other". And we stand on this primordial and very unfamiliar threshold. My claim is that this is where philosophy is trying to take us.

The passage in John 1:1 is mysticism with roots in platonism and stoicism. I think the assumption running through it was that the world's logic is our logic. We perceive the world's logic through a kind of sympathy that could be described as having access to the divine mind through logic. Or you could say our minds are the Divine mind, just muddied.

Two side effects were:

1. The One, which is a higher, unexpressable truth, and

2. Matter, the mind's dead end.

These are like poles between which the mind swings like a pendulum. And this is the trinity, btw: the Christian translation is Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. The original was One, Logos, and Anima. — frank

And to make that dramatic step toward the one: how is this done? Isn't the logos, in this extraordinary affair, simply a term that would possess what it is that lies so impossibly before the inquirer? Philosophy is, one might say, the true final frontier, and the obstacles it presents are about its own structure and history. The utterance itself turns on, militates against, the endeavor! For the finality lies not in a more and more elaborate construction of a grand thesis, as if Hegelian Geist were unfolding in the dialectical path of conceiving it, but in the impossible simplicity that is originally there. Impossible because, recalling Kierkegaard, actuality is NOT rational. Divinity discovery is not rational achievement.

"In the beginning" there were (are?) vacuum fluctuations. — 180 Proof

Certainly. But it depends on if you are interested in philosophical analysis or scientific. This latter is not at the basic level, for it presupposes phenomenal presentedness.

The Greek ‘logos’ as presupposed by a beginning has precedence. Yet the ultimate in logos means not just ‘word’ or ‘logic’ - it points to the possibility/impossibility of experiencing the perfect relation or absolute interconnectedness (omniscience). And logos is not alone. — Possibility

But to talk about possibility of impossibility points first to the "'words or logic" that constructs concepts like possibility and impossibility. Perfect relation? What is this if not a language construction? Absolute interconnectedness in the logos? What is this if not a logical interconnectedness? That is, the "saying" is always analytically first.

What else is presupposed by a beginning? Aristotle refers to logos alongside ethos and pathos in terms of one’s capacity or potential to persuade. Except an ultimate notion of ethos is not just about character, but points to the possibility/impossibility of achieving quality, or excellence (omnibenevolence) through distinction. And the ultimate in pathos is not just about feeling or motivation, but points to the possibility/impossibility of tapping into an infinite source of energy (omnipotence). — Possibility

And this tapping into eternity, how does this cash out in analysis? Terms like finitude and infinity are fascinating to me, but it is not as if they are exhausted in the mere utterance, the incidental usage. for the question posed here goes to the structure of time itself. Time, I claim (and I am no more than what I read) is the structure of finitude, and finitude is subsumed by eternity, both, obviously, difficult terms and deserve discussion, but the final discussion to be had on this and any matter looks at the th phenomenological analysis of time. What is time? This is presupposed by talk about beginnings.

It is at the intersection of these possibilities/impossibilities of absolute, infinite perfection, which both limit and are contingent upon each other, that we find a beginning, the origin of ideas and meaning, to potential and value, and from there to events and ‘beginnings’. No relation, however perfect, could even exist without experience: the possibility of energy source differentiated by quality. And no source of energy, however infinite, is even useful without identity: the possibility of distinguishing the quality of proper relations. And finally, there can be no distinction of excellence or quality without the fundamental laws of physics: the possibility of ideal relation in the use of energy. And vice versa. — Possibility

Don't know what you mean by infinite perfection. Not that I have no ideas about such a thing, but what you mean is not clear. At any rate, This intersection: is there just this (leaning Heideggarian) construction? Or is there not something, if you will, behind this in the reductive act of suspending all these possibilities? Once you step into that rarified world where language's grasp on the givenness of things is loosened, and meaning is free from interpretative restraint, is there not some undeniable qualitative change in the perceptual event as such?

What you say about identity is quite right, I think, and this then makes a turn toward agency, for identity is general, definitional, as in the identity of a term, a concept, but agency is all about the actuality of what it is (who it is). Most clearly an issue for ethics.