nothing about how no one would misjudge this as an actual Pollock just because his genius is unmistakable — apokrisis

A forger could be a genius too, or not. If not, then I doubt there would be much trouble detecting forgery. I hadn't realized there have been so many Pollock fakes, but then I didn't search it, and was merely speaking from what I have encountered.

I know what I see in works and how I judge their greatness, but that is not something I can explain; aesthetic quality in general is inexplicable, or at least all explanations are under-determined. I have found that people generally either get it or they don't; perhaps it cannot be taught at all.

I don't recognise this caricature from what I have seen inside the said institutions of learning. This is wishful thinking. — apokrisis

If you don't recognize that people generally tend to become attached to their theories and defend them dogmatically, in science just as anywhere else, then all I can say is that I wonder what planet you've been living on.

According to Kant, a priori knowledge refers to knowledge that is independent of experience, meaning it is derived from reason and logic alone. — Wayfarer

How could you have an understanding of space or time if you had never been embodied in a spatiotemporal realm? Reason and logic alone are empty and by themselves can give us nothing, being as they are merely formal codifications of the rules that govern "correct" thinking.

“But although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience.” This is from the CPR.

It's a subtle point but I take it to mean that a priori knowledge is not directly apprehended in experience but is derived by reflecting on its general characteristics. For example, we might say that we do not directly experience space and time, but we do experience objects as always being spatially extended and temporally enduring. This re-cognition can then be generalized to the a priori principle that all experiences must be given either temporally or spatially or both.

Without prior experience to reflect upon (without memory in other words), how would we ever be able to discover such principles? The only way then would be to examine present experience, and see that, yes, all the objects in my field of vision are spatially and temporally extended although the temporal part might be a bit difficult to realize without any memory at all.

A priori knowledge - things that are known by reason alone - doesn't arise from experience, as a matter of definition for Kant. — Wayfarer

I believe that is untrue. Kant as I remember it, acknowledges that all knowledge begins with experience. The synthetic a priori is knowledge which has been synthesized by reflection on and generalization from experience, and which, once acquired, is henceforth independent of experience for its validation.

@Mww?

What is rational ability, though? The ability to compare and measure (ratio) is undeniably something we, and some animals can do. But rationality considered as valid reasoning either cannot be done in the absence of symbolic language, or if it can, how would we ever be able to tell?

I tend to agree with you that abstraction (or generalizing from particulars) relies on language. We know at least that the ability to report doing it certainly relies on language. Dogs see objects as kinds, though, even if not consciously or explicitly. They see stairs as to be walked up or down, doorways as to be walked through, balls or sticks as to be chased, bowls to be eaten or drunk from, streams to be swum in or drunk from, food of the right kinds as to be eaten, and so on.

The reason I mentioned the argument from equals, was in relation to the earlier question of the nature of mathematical intuition and the ability to grasp abstractions. The argument from equals is one of the canonical arguments for universals. I just think it is a fairly simple and direct way of pointing that out. — Wayfarer

There are other ways of explaining those abilities; from the basic capacities for counting and recognition of entities and kinds of entities that we can also observe in animals. I find those explanations more plausible that the notion of reason as something that comes from a transcendent realm to bless only the humans. To me, that is human exceptionalism; one of our biggest problems, or more accurately the source of most of our major extraordinary problems.

You mean, Socrates, or 'the argument from reason', has it backwards. (I am quoting him.) — Wayfarer

Well, yes, it doesn't matter who the proponent is; the point is that the argument has it backwards (in my view).

But you do need to have the ability to grasp what 'exactly equals' means. — Wayfarer

I would say that all you need is the ability to see difference and similarity, and to examine enough things which look superficially the same, like fallen autumn leaves for example, to realize that exact similitude does not occur in nature.

It's just the other side of the coin; once we can recognize similarity and difference, and understand that there are degrees of similarity, then the idea of perfect sameness follows dialectically as an (apparently) unrealizable possibility.

It's the same with roundness, squareness, sphericity and cubicity and so on. It's also the same with colours: there is no perfect red, yellow, orange, blue, green, purple, black, white, or any other colour or tone; there are millions of possible variations.

Art is literally a way of speaking to others about ideas and feelings of a certain kind. It is intrinsically the communal thing - the social organism thing - of forming a generalised and shared worldview. — apokrisis

Art is a way of speaking about feelings and experiences which cannot be rendered in generalized explanatory terms. My experience is that you may start with a kind of vision or intimation which is worked towards, and at some point abandoned rather than finished, when you feel satisfied that it has culminated in being a apt expression of that vision or those intimations, I can't be any clearer than that.

I don't think art is about forming a generalized and shared worldview (well, I mean it could be in some cases) as it is about finding expression for one's own experiences and feelings. If others relate
then great, if not, then too bad.

Not for them the lab tests to check out the canvas and pigments for their authenticity. No need but to stand back and see the mark of genius imprinted on the flecks and splatter. — apokrisis

On the face of it, drip paintings should be the easiest to forge. I'm not aware of any attempts to forge a Pollock except for something that happened here in Sydney when I was at art school in the early seventies. I heard that there was an exhibition of previously undiscovered works by Pollock in one of the rooms in the campus. When I looked at them, I could see straight away that they we amateurish with none of the nuance, understanding of tonal or colour relationships or strength of composition of a Pollock. It was immediately obvious to me, and by his reports, the friend I was with, that it was a hoax.

That said I don't deny that a very talented forger could produce a work that might fool the experts simply because such a work would have the same colour, tone and composition strengths, and the same kind of allusiveness and power of vision as a genuine Pollock.

Instead there is a vigorous debate going on and big things keep getting discovered. — apokrisis

A debate which would be all the more vigorous if humans did not have such a tendency to dogmatize knowledge, and if institutions of learning did not have such a tendency to exclude conjectures which are perceived to be outside the currently accepted orthodoxy.

If we are someone’s computer simulation, we haven’t stumbled upon any glitches in the matrix that I can think of. — apokrisis

Even if we were, there would still have to be a real world in which our simulation was being run. Not an idea to be taken seriously.

Sticks that appear to be equal and unequal are imperfectly equal. However, the recognition of the sticks as imperfectly equal requires knowledge of perfect equality - otherwise, in virtue of what are they being recognized as imperfect? — Wayfarer

I think you have it exactly backwards. On cursory examination two stones or sticks may appear to be of equal length, shape or size, but on closer examination and measurement it will be seen that they are not exactly the same.

Reflection on this and on the obvious fact that no two things are ever exactly the same leads to the counterfactual notion of perfect equality as an imaginable and not logically contradictory possibility, but which does not seem to be possibility of this world.

We don't need to have a prior idea of perfect equality in order to notice that there are always differences, however minor they might be, between actual things.

Nope, that's pretty much it. Intuition is improved by acquiring knowledge. That's all.
— Darkneos

Your intuitions about intuition could use some development.

If knowledge is justified true belief, then that is different than intuition. (Or at least the 'justification is of a different sort than what we typically think of as justification for a belief to be considered knowledge.) — wonderer1

@Darkneos seems to be trading on the ambiguity of the term 'knowledge', What he said makes no sense if you consider knowledge as being JTB, but if you think of it as being know-how, then it does make sense.

Of course that’s metaphysics. Metaphysics pertains to the fact that language, culture and how the world appears to us empirically are inextricably bound together as a unified web. — Joshs

That's just a fancy way of saying that language and culture influence to some degree the way we see things. I have never disputed that. Dispassionate scientific observation is the closest we can come to seeing things without bias. We do that by leaving ourselves out of the picture.

It is a methodological Epoché which is kind of like the mirror image of the phenomenological Epoché that brackets the question of the existence of an external world. I notice you haven't attempted to address the issue for your comprehensively constructivist view that the obvious intelligibility for animals of their environments poses.

What does it mean for a paradigm to be ‘in accord with’ how the world is? What happens to how the world appears to us when we turn a worldview on its head? — Joshs

Worldviews do not much affect how people experience and basically understand the everyday world of natural and human events. As to paradigm shifts regarding how phenomena are understood, can you think of a major one which wasn't scientific, or else a transition from a previous worldview we would not count as being scientific, to one that we would count as scientific?

The change from a classical physical worldview to a quantum physical worldview has not made cars, animals, trees, chairs, houses, roads, mountains, rivers, oceans, planets, stars and galaxies seem any less real or material, or appear any different visually.

Now why would a 'good' god who could do anything specifically chose a creation built upon predation - suffering and chaos as a way of life? — Tom Storm

Because he moves in mysterious ways or in other words "he just fuck'n does, right"!. :wink:

What about non-traditional metaphysics , or metaphysics period? If analysis of the origin and nature of the paradigmatic structures and worldviews that make empirical facts and truths intelligible do not produce clearly decidable ways of establishing their truths or coherence, what do you think it is that makes empirical facts and truth decidable and coherent? Perhaps your answer is in the next quote: — Joshs

Such an analysis is a matter for phenomenology or epistemology. Those structures and worldviews do not make intelligibility possible; on the contrary they would be impossible without intelligibility. Our understanding of our own epistemic structures and worldviews is a reflective understanding of ourselves, our culture and our language, and that is not metaphysics.

One thing that is often forgotten by those who hold that the empirical environment we experience and understand is constructed * as opposed to, in the human case, merely mediated) by language and culture is that the environment is also intelligible for animals, which is evidenced by the ways in which they can successfully navigate around and survive in the natural environment (and generally better in fact than we can, if we leave behind all our civilized accoutrements).

Science deals with the empirical world considered as it appears to us, without trying to take account of factors extraneous to the phenomena themselves, since to try to incorporate the subject into the picture would only create confusion. How would you incorporate the experiencing subject into the understanding of plate Techtonics, for example?

So the findings of the sciences are what makes a metaphysics plausible? I would say you have that exactly backwards. How can the results of a methodology whose central concept, observed evidence, is only intelligible within an overarching paradigmatic framework be used to validate that overarching framework? — Joshs

A metaphysics which is in accordance with how the world is, as we experience and understand it scientifically, is at least more plausible than a metaphysics produced by speculating about reified concepts which are based on linguistic and cultural associations, that is all I meant to say. I didn't mean to say that any metaphysics can ever be proven (or disproven).

But I don't think the concept of god is a crossword puzzle to be solved over the weekend, with cups of tea and some hard thinking. If reason, time and space emanate from god's nature (and who is to know if this is the case?) then god presumably transcends such strictures and as such is likely unintelligible. — Tom Storm

:100: Nicely and succinctly said.

I will just point out that your talk of solitary art does acknowledge the social context which can justify your painting and drawing as that kind of thing rather than some weird scratching and smearing at a surface which might make you a rather suspect character in out tight little community. — apokrisis

Yes, of course I acknowledge the social dimension of art, the history of art; 'art' here denoting all the arts. Where art differs from mountain climbing is that it is an adventure which yields tangible results that others may or may not relate to and value.

When Jackson Pollock produced the first drip paintings many people claimed a monkey could have produced them. To me this is nonsense, no one since Pollock has produced drip paintings that remotely compare to his. But of course, not everyone sees this, and it is not something you can convincingly argue for. People either see it or they don't. And there is no way of definitively establishing that seeing such aesthetic qualities is illusory or not, other than the individual being the judge of their own experience, and that experience, no matter how profound or intense, is not something that can be evidence for others. In other words, art is simply not science or logic.

It's like when you tramp in the mountains; some may see and feel the sublime beauty there and others not. Individual experiences cannot be compared, so in that sense they "drop out of the conversation" as @Banno likes to say.

But the fact that we have these incomparable experiences does not drop out of the conversation, because many people do enjoy them, and it is arguable that they can recognize the marks of such experiences in art works and in the reports of others.

No one likes to think of art as a business or trade. But then no one likes seeing the sausage getting made. :razz: — apokrisis

That the visual arts, particularly painting, is also a business or trade, and for some an extremely lucrative one cannot be denied. I know a successful artist who sells his paintings for hundreds of thousands of dollars each. But everyone wants his paintings which are of a particular subject he arrived at early on, so he cannot explore his creative ideas to his satisfaction but must keep producing the product others want, and he says this is frustrating although necessary since he has to make a million dollars a year just to service the mortgages on his houses in Australia, France and London. So for creative outlet he plays in a jazz band.

By contrast, no one makes any money out of being a poet.

So you assert. But I find Peirce’s theory of truth a more useful view. Conclusions are more about what we could all agree. Truth is the limit of a community of inquiry. So no beetles in boxes allowed. — apokrisis

And yet there is so little general agreement today. I'm currently reading a book by John Hands, in which he talks about all the objections to the standard model of the Big Bang in cosmology and how proponents of alternative models find difficulty in getting their work published on account of the almost religious dogmatism with which the BB model is considered to be just simply fact.

So, it has little to do with "beetles in boxes". If you read my posts you will see that I am often disagreeing with @Wayfarer that traditional metaphysics is a discursively viable subject of discussion if the aim is arriving at the truth; I say it isn't because there is no clearly decidable way of establishing the truth of such metaphysical propositions as God, transcendence, eternal life, free will and so on, or whether materialism or idealism are closer to the truth about the absolute nature of things, or even whether such ideas are coherent or whether we know what we are talking about when we try to address such issues.

We probably agree on one thing, which is that any plausible metaphysics will be based on, or at least in accordance with, the findings of the sciences. That said, it's not always easy to establish just what the truest current findings in the sciences even are, or to have confidence that anything we think today will hold up for another hundred years. Hopefully the cream rises to the top over time, but we have no way of being sure of that outcome.

I like to walk up mountains and talk philosophy with friends too.

If we filtered out all of that pain and humiliation, I'd wager that many would still feel from death. But yeah the association of death is aging and accidents and violence isn't the best marketing for it. — plaque flag

I agree, I'd say that, primordially, it's fear of the unknown and the incomprehensibility of the possibility of non-existence.

:up: Just watched the series The Man in the High Castle (haven't read the book). I thought it was pretty good.

The mouth of the funnel can be as wide as you want to imagine. It is all going to narrow down to the method of pragmatic reason - the semiotic modelling relation - in my view. — apokrisis

If you have a particular goal in mind that will constrain your thinking, narrow it down. The semiotic modeling relation would be one conceptual constraint, which I have to say I'm wary of universalizing.

Sure. But what I am stressing is that art is not a solitary enterprise. It doesn’t exist unless it is shared. — apokrisis

That seems too narrow a view of art to me. Art may be a solitary enterprise or it may not be. No one escapes from being influenced by some aspects of culture, even if only by being inducted into a linguistic community. But the social dimension is by no means the whole of the story as i see it. I paint and draw and I also write poetry; when asked why I do these things I say in regard to the first "to discover how I see, and how I feel and understand beauty and aliveness in terms of tone, colour, intensity and calm in terms of visual composition".

I have painted for more than fifty years and only recently bothered to pursue showing any of my work. Similarly, I write to see how I think. I'm not much concerned about publishing my work; because that's not why I do it. If I published it ans someone could relate to itl got something out of it, then great. If no one related to it it wouldn't matter to me because I know what it means to me.

Technology, as logic paired with fossil fuel, is what has actually put human society on its exponential path of becoming the global planetary organism. The domestication of the Earth with a metabolism of concrete, cows and corn.

Philosophy barely talks about this with any insight. Economics and sociology are only waking up to it. — apokrisis

This I totally agree with. :up:

There is a metaphysics here where biology > physics.

Now that is what counts as a paradigm shift and a social surprise. But also one that aligns with mind > matter if you squint just right and understand this in terms of Peircean immanence rather than Cartesian transcendence. — apokrisis

And this! I have no truck with transcendence because I think it is incoherent and irrelevant; but that's just me. I have no objection to others entertaining such ideas (or believing that they are in fact entertaining ideas :wink:)

I have no desire to disabuse anyone of anything unless they ask for it by arguing for, or simply asserting, whatever, as being the one truth or true path to the truth.

Rationality is a collective enterprise, but it is a method not a set of conclusions; conclusions are matters for individuals. A valid argument is only as good as its premises (which are themselves not justified by the argument, but in some other way, with its own set of presuppositions). In other words, at least in relation to metaphysics, soundness is in the eye of the beholder.

Yes. Thales brought back geometry from Egypt, Anaximander was his pupil, then a teenage Pythagoras is said to have travelled to Miletus to learn from them. — apokrisis

Fair enough, I was thinking more along the lines of mathematical understanding itself being a directly motivating influence

.

Is intellectual desire an emotion? Is rigour not partner to the imagination in being the constraint on its degrees of freedom? — apokrisis

Right, but there are different degrees of appropriate constraint in different contexts.

Generally i would argue you are using confused psychology here. It is the Romantic fiction of how brains should work rather than the pragmatic and validated model of how they actually work. And so this can’t be a recipe for how to do thinking better. — apokrisis

Again, it depends on what kind of thinking you want to do. Different tools for different jobs and all that.

So sure, who could argue with stimulating the emotions and imagination as opposed to constraining and stifling those things. But that framing isn’t itself true to the psychology of rational inquiry. — apokrisis

Right, rational enquiry is one thing, though, and poetry and the arts in general another, not to mention personal transformation. These things don't have to be "rationally correct" they just have to be something alive.

What does art school teach but how to cultivate a personal mystique by learning how to distill down a viewpoint that resonates with some generic cultural concern. It is the manufacture of provocative artefacts marketed by social networking. — apokrisis

To me this view seems too simplistic. Artists may also create novel cultural concerns. Everything human is culturally mediated, to be sure, but it is not culture exhaustively and all the way down as I see it.

So there is a genuine pragmatism in art in that it serves this political function. We agree to a collective awe which makes us all equal under the force of some higher power. We need a god equivalent even if we might - as greenies - call it nature,

Human psychology is a fascinating but explicable thing. — apokrisis

I think I can agree with this, I am all for seeing nature as sacred, rather than some unknowable transcendence. I think it is healthy for humans to maintain a sense of the sacredness of life, of being itself, even if only to dispel the tedium of the commonplace for a while.

Also know as Norman O. Brown. One of those radical 60s thinkers. An almost mystical use of psychoanalysis by a humanities scholar. — plaque flag

Oh, right, I have a couple of his books, which I've only dipped into. It was the "Nobby" which threw me.

To me it makes sense that we'd evolve an (irrational) fear of death. Schopenhauer filtered through Darwin is a strong dark brew. But I like it as a map for hacking the system (condoms are a great example of this, like steeling cheese from the trap.) — plaque flag

Right, there is nothing rational about the radically unknown. There is also the fact that death, or rather dying, is associated with loss of faculties and capacities, pain and indignity, and loss of everything familiar, so maybe the fear is not entirely irrational.

To me it's even to be expected. Darwin etc. — plaque flag

Christianity? and Abrahamic religions in general? Capitalism? Marxism? I don't know, maybe they are symtpoms of something inevitable. We keep cheating extinction just because we can, because unlike the other animals we can come up with strategies, plan ahead.

:up: Yes, what could be the point of a philosophy which could not change the way we feel about life, even change the way we live? Let a philosophy be as absolutely correct as you like: should we count it as valuable if it makes us feel not better, but worse, about life?

Indeed. Poetry now inhabits a cultural backwater, like bocce or folk dancing - there's a cognoscenti for it, but it's only a shadow of what used to be. — Tom Storm

Agree :100:

Indeed and (this is only a minor point) I find it interesting how often pejorative language (like 'mechanistic') is employed to describe reason or science. It seems to me that a form of romanticism still has us (perhaps postmodernism is a type of romanticism too) and it seeks to elevate the personal, the emotional, the relationship, the experience, as contrasted with the mechanical, the impersonal, the rational, the transactional, the disenchanted. But I suspect we don't have to use these words to characterize any way of seeing. It depends upon the individual seer. — Tom Storm

:up: I agree and I've often said to Wayfarer that I don't believe a materialist metaphysic has any necessary bearing on spiritual or ethical practice; it always depends on the individual as to how they are variously affected by such ideas.

It sounds like we have had quite similar love experiences in our youth. And yes, being hopelessly in love with a woman who was hopelessly in love with me was such a wonderful experience in my early twenties. But she had to leave Australia to pursue a career in music, and although she didn't want to go without me, I didn't see what I would do in London, and in any case her rich mother was not going to pay for me to live there, and I had no money of my own, being the bum I was back then. I had to talk her into going, against my own wishes, because I didn't want to be the one to hold her back. I suffered immensely for a couple years, but I still would not do anything different if I had that time over again.

Let's try this in a different key. Imagine two single mothers trading their children, because in both cases they expect a better fit. Does this not offend us ? But is there no cold-bloodedly ethical/rational case to be made for a switch in some situations ? — plaque flag

I guess we'd say they'd be going against their instincts; and we don't like to think that motherhood should ever be a "cold-bloodedly ethical/ rational" relation.

Schop is saying that philosophy's task is purely critical - in the Kantian sense of making us aware of the limitations of discursive reason. It 'drops you at the border', so to speak. — Wayfarer

I can see the case for thinking of philosophy in that Kantian way. It makes metaphysics in the traditional sense discursively impossible or incoherent, but it makes way for faith, or stimulated imagination driven emotion, and that can indeed be transformative, even if it cannot deliver any propositions that we can rationally argue for. Hence the Critique of Practical Reason.

I find Schopenhauer's claim that we can know the in itself introspectively as will to be nothing more than an article of faith, but then if that idea could be a possible inspiration to spiritual transformation, who cares if it is discursively justifiable?

I can relate to what you say. Nobby Brown compared lifedeath with undeath or immortality. The immortal is neither alive nor dead. It's frozen. While life, in motion, is always also death.

I think this is part of Heidegger's point about our tendency to identify the permanent with the real. Is there is logical reason for this ? Or an irrational motive ?

At the end of Fast Sofa, a character who was uptight for most of the movie has some insight and loses all fear, basically going 'crazy' and dying in a high speed crash.

I connect this to the 'poisoncure' of philosophy, personified as Hamlet, who questions whether leaving early (dying) is really a thing to be avoided. We typically assume the importance of longevity, as if quantity is not at least threatened with absurdity in the context of the vastness of death.

I'm not equating wisdom with recklessness, but I am challenging the assumption that the goal of life is automatically to live as long as possible (and to identity with something that endures forever). Tristram and Isolde, or the fight for Freedom. We love those plots. Risk is a measure of passion. (Dying for love connects us back to Schopenhauer. The species-pole in us, the genitals, know themselves immortal -- and they overpower the deathfearing ego. — plaque flag

I am not familiar with Nobby Brown. It seems humans have long entertained ideas of perpetual life. There is no logical contradiction in the idea, but every way of framing it seems to generate its own host of aporias. And yes life is always also death; my life inevitably comes at the cost of many others, and others will come at the cost of mine. Maybe one day there will be no life at all, since it is based on strategies of cheating entropic and that requires conditions to be just right.

As to the equation of the permanent with the real; perhaps we could say that being is permanent, that universal non-being is impossible. But being is also never static, so no particular being (or so it seems) can be permanent. Our own impermanence bothers us, but that seems to be an ego-driven concern.

I haven't seen Fast Sofa, sounds intriguing. When I was in my late teens and early twenties I was ridiculously reckless, being influenced by the beats, particularly Kerouac and his Neal Cassidy character. I often marvel that I didn't die in a car crash, driving absurdly fast while heavily intoxicated on alcohol, marijuana and LSD as I did.

Surprisingly, I have been so lucky as to never have been involved in an accident where I was at fault in over 50 years of driving. Nowadays I want to live as long as possible, so I live a very healthy and balanced life with little indulgence in drugs or alcohol. When I say I want to live as long as possible the caveat of course is as long as life remains interesting and emotionally and physically bearable.

I have no interest at all in the idea of an afterlife, and since I never had any interest in having children, I have no interest in that avenue of perceived immortality either, so my genitals don't feel immortal: in fact, sadly, they seem to have declined in vigor somewhat (although thankfully so far not too much).

As an aside, lately I've been considering the question as to whether we should care about the survival of humanity as a whole, and I've even thought about starting a thread based on that question. Many of the problems we face today seem to have come about on account of the predominating belief in human exceptionalism.

I agree, though maybe poetry already 'secretly' rules philosophy from the center. Forums like this suggest to me that there's a variety of fundamental 'images' of the (ideal) philosophy -- varieties of cognitive heroism. — plaque flag

Right, there is not one true image of philosophy. Personally, I favour the idea of it, not as a search for truth or correctness of locution, but as a generator of new concepts with which to look at things in more novel and creative ways, or alternatively, which may in some senses be the same thing, a philosophy as a set of ideas that fires the imagination in ways which could facilitate bringing about altered states of consciousness and personal transformation which enables living in better ways.

I don’t mean this in a boundary policing way but it seems obvious that poetry is from the oral level of human cultural organisation and philosophy is from the logical. — apokrisis

Yes, you might say that, very broadly speaking, poetry deals with the allegorical, the mythical, the metaphorical concerns and philosophy deals with the logical concerns. I don't see a strict boundary though, and judging from your posts I doubt you do either.

Philosophy was born out of numbers and logic, its version of words and rules. — apokrisis

I'm not sure I completely agree with this: I can see it being applicable in the case of Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle, but would you say it is true of the Presocratics?

So how could poetry take philosophy somewhere new, somewhere further, than numbers and logic? — apokrisis

In the transformative ways I outlined in my response to @plaque flag. I think it is as important to stimulate the imagination and the emotions as it is to satisfy the intellectual desire for rigorous understandings.

Does it point to feeling and value as that which the age of machinery has forgotten? And even if it is a call back to society’s more basic level of oral order, is mechanistic reason not capable of delivering a point of view on feelings and values that is itself suitable for a world as it is currently being made? — apokrisis

I don't see why mechanistic reason could not deliver a point of view on feelings and values that is suitable for modern life. I guess it depends on individual needs and interests though. As I have no doubt you know I have great respect for science and I believe that metaphysical speculation is "pouring from the empty into the void" if it does not take account of the latest science.

But I am also drawn by the arts, by the idea of creating one's own life (in the sense that Foucault advocates) and I think for that we may need to let go of some of the rigour and mechanistic thinking and allow ourselves to mythologize (while also being careful not to take myths too seriously or literally). This is only for the exercise of the imagination and when such myth-making is taken to be literal truth, then the whole benefit of allegory and metaphor is lost.

Poetry has high status. — apokrisis

I'm not sure it enjoys as high a status today as it did at other times, speaking generally of course.

Through suffering and reflection, the lover separates projection from reality, becoming less capable of intense passion. This is the form of beauty becoming detached from individual bodies and being recognizing as an idea (etymologically a [projected] image). — plaque flag

Yes, the ancient idea of passion was actually related to passivity, to being helplessly affected. The more modern idea is to love whatever is your calling intensely. It's not easy or common for sexual relationships to reach the heights of passion in the latter sense, while in the former sense it is arguably largely hormone-driven.

I think the poem speaks to the idea that loving another should honor their individuality and freedom to the utmost. If this involves letting them go their own way, then so be it. Surely this is common enough with good parenting?

I think we agree that there are limits to mere thought. I'm trying to sketch what I see as what many spiritual life strategies have in common as 'causi sui' autonomy projects. The body remains stubbornly foundational. The world can't be completely conquered with attitude and philosophy. — plaque flag

Spiritual projects tend to be trying to short circuit mere thought. I'm all for that, but it is a different conception of philosophy—"philosophy as a way of life", as Hadot or Sloterdijk would have it. The latter was a disciple of Osho for several years and sees Osho as being the greatest spiritual genius of the 20th century. Spiritual disciplines and philosophy conceived in this way are not concerned with discussion and the pursuit of discursive truth so much as they are concerned with altering consciousness and experience.

So, I think you are right in one sense, but in another sense the world can be and is being conquered with attitude and philosophy, and this conquering is a terrible tragedy. The very idea of conquering the world is a dualism-driven error

The self cannot be mastered completely by means of discourse (attitude and philosophy), but they are perhaps the first step on the way, for some at least.

.

The philosopher must detach this beauty from the fragile and unruly flesh and convert it to an imperishable possession which time cannot steal.

I'm not claiming that this can be achieved completely or even that it's desirable. I'm just trying to sketch a particular enactment of the hero with a thousand faces. — plaque flag

I think the idea of eternity is often misinterpreted as meaning everlasting life and bliss. I see this dream too as being a form of attachment. I like Blake's notion of eternity—‘To see a World in a Grain of Sand and a Heaven in a Wild Flower, hold Infinity in the palm of your hand and Eternity in an hour.’

So, I don't think seeking the imperishable is the royal road to eternity, in fact quite the opposite. Combine Parmenides and Heraclitus to find the changeless right there in the heart of endless change.

I agree, but I think it's a soft, flexible dualism. Following Ryle maybe, I think the problem only begins when a flexible inner/outer distinction hardens into an 'absolute' indirect realism. — plaque flag

Right, you often refer to the importance of metaphor, and I think it is the "softness" and "flexibility of metaphor which enables the communication of ideas through evocation and allusion, allows them to escape the hard walled prison of rigorous logic and mechanistic (cause and effect) thinking.

It seems to me poetry could have a much greater role to play in philosophy than it does or has. Some of the best poetry is and has been philosophical. A few of the more prominent examples that spring to mind being Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Coleridge, Eliot, Stevens, Merwin, Aamons and Ashberry. There are many others.

I don't quote Husserl as an authority, but only to show that he wrestled at times with what a Cartesian approach cannot digest. — plaque flag

The deepest aspect of this problem being that our language is Cartesian through and through, our thinking utterly suffused with dualism.

I think I see what this aims at, basically at something nondual like pure being. But I see no reason to call it solitude, for that metaphor depends on 'I-the-man' in the background. Husserl can't have his cake and eat it too. Is it not like this? — plaque flag

:up: Yes, non-dual being cannot be solitude, for the latter is a dualistic idea, in that you can only be alone in relation to others.

it is true that some find their lives so intolerable that they run to the gallows.

As far as I can tell, much of spirituality is a version of nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so. — plaque flag

I'd say it is more precisely attachment to things which makes them bad; changing the way you think may be a start, but it is not enough.

Love is where you found it
floundering
sometimes it’s cool
sometimes it’s hot
whether of or for
a fool or not
some say it’s all you got

love is not a tool
you should not use it
if you try
you will abuse it
and your love will die

love is everything
the universal glue that binds
yet bondage is unkind
to love so let it go—
although
you held on tight
you must be ever ready
to say “goodnight”

Now I'm even more confused, because surely Wayfarer does not intend to claim that those who disagree him are behaving irrationally, but if their beliefs are rationally inferred then no historical explanation for their holding those beliefs is even possible. — Srap Tasmaner

This is right on the mark...it is not uncommon for people to be unable to conceive that someone could rationally disagree with the ideas that they think they have arrived at by pure reasoning. You don't agree? Then you must have a scotoma, or you must have failed to understand the argument or, as you say, be caught up in the growing tide of superficiality the culture is being driven by.

Well, there was this book... — Banno

What book? Does that sentence convey any actuality? If so, how would that not qualify as its having pictured a state of affairs?

Did the book in question convey anything about anything?

If I say "go and get the car out of the garage" you know what I mean. That instruction calls up a picture of opening the garage, starting the car and driving it out, so I'm not sure what you think is the problem with the idea that language can picture things we do in the world.

The premise, or rather question, in the OP is "how does language map onto the world?". It seems to me that the only possible answer is that language maps onto the world insofar as we understand it to do so.

Isn't this leading towards anti-realism? It also sounds a bit like 'shut up and calculate'. — Tom Storm

The flip-side of that is that there is a sense in which all claims are implicitly realist. How can language mirror reality? Only if the reality it mirrors is something created by, or at least co-created with, language. The idea that language cannot mirror reality posits a different kind of unknowable reality that is altogether beyond human experience and judgement. That said, I don't think language mirrors everyday pre-conceptual experience, unless you allow that it is a distorting mirror.

For everyday practical purposes, language mirrors what we see is going on well enough to be a practical tool for issuing instructions, passing along information, and so on. That much is obvious, and of course, that is not to say that is all language does, but whatever it does, it does by virtue of being, or at least seeming, intelligible. Could we ever find a way to tell the difference between seeming intelligible and being intelligible?

Toying around with it is the transcendence of gallowshumor. — plaque flag

It has been my observation that people generally only toy around with pessimism and indulge in gallows humour when they are not actually facing the gallows (metaphorically speaking, of course). It is easy enough to laugh at the reaper, when you are not standing in his shadow. Perhaps some "heroic spirits" keep up the humour until the bitter end, but it would take a lot to convince me that is anything more than pretence. (Which I guess is what you would expect given that most of human life seems to be pretence). Wisdom perhaps consists in knowing that you are just pretending, showing-off...and then,,,to show-off or not to show-off, that is the question,

'Progress' is an ambiguous term, usually carrying the idea of improvement. So, yeah, of course there has been a progression of philosophical ideas.

Any improvement (according to some) or worsening (according to others) of philosophical understanding has arguably come on the back of scientific progress.

It's also easier to read. — Banno

For some.

That's two votes for better understanding through history, which it's hard to argue with. I've often wished math and science were taught with more of an eye to history. — Srap Tasmaner

I think it's likely a problem of complexity. Maths and science have cutting edges in ways philosophy really doesn't. Philosophy on the whole is a much simpler suite of ideas, even being, as I remember reading in Hegel somewhere "the same old stew, reheated" (although I cannot find the quote anywhere, maybe I dreamed it).

Math and Science are certainly not the same old stew reheated, they unarguably progress.

A better approach might be to begin with what is at hand, our being as embedded in a world that is already, and by that very fact, the subject of our manipulation. This latter seems to me the view Wittgenstein offers. — Banno

It is also the approach Heidegger offers, and in much more detail than Wittgenstein. That said, Heidegger himself later came to think that the attempt to explain the "background" or 'form of life' discursively is doomed to failure and he turned to a kind of obscure philosophical poetry in an attempt to invoke (show) rather than describe the human form of being.

I find nothing at all to disagree with in what you say here. I think we are always going to simplify things, even egregiously so, when we attempt to piece together, from our armchairs, how we come to experience a coherent environment of things, relations and events. And yes, of course, nothing in isolation...

Surely Quine put the analytic-synthetic distinction, if not in its grave, at least in mortal peril. Or are you both closet Chomskyans? — Banno

I don't hold a low opinion of phenomenology, as you apparently do, so I accept that we can reflect on experience or perception and identify its inherent characteristics. I said somewhere recently that the idea that space and time are the pure forms of intuition is an example of this. Once we come to think of it, the idea that any perception could be neither spatially or temporally given just seems wrong, incomprehensible. So we can say that the idea is synthesized from experience, but once realized, does not need to be checked against subsequent experiences to be confirmed.

I also said that it could be looked at another way; that analytically speaking anything that could count as an experience. must be spatially and/ or temporally given or it would not qualify. Again, an example of two different ways of thinking about the same thing. That said, it is not tautologically true that all experiences must be spatially and/ or temporally given; to say that there could be an experience which is not so given is not a purely logical contradiction.

Philosophers of mathematics argue as to whether it is analytic or synthetic; maybe there is no definite answer to that; it could be both or either, depending on how you think about it. We always seem to fall into thinking there is a fact of the matter with such questions.

:up: Nicely put! I do see Kant as being, essentially, a phenomenologist.

:up: It's fine to disagree, but I should note that I don't favour either way of framing it. I think it is an inherent aporia and I am comfortable with that. That said, I think we both agree that what appears to us as the vase exists independently of us; we do not construct its existence from scratch, or even merely from our rationality, language or culture.

I have noticed with respect to Peirce, that whenever I bring up his categorisation as an objective idealist, you find ways to deprecate that or explain it away as not being what is important about his work. — Wayfarer

Are we obliged to accept every aspect of a philosopher's work or worldview? We can't think for ourselves?

Plainly I've been born in the wrong century, although we all have to learn to cope. — Wayfarer

Some are ahead of the times and others behind them. Or if you like:

"The Harlots cry from Street to Street
Shall weave Old Englands winding Sheet
The Winners Shout the Losers Curse
Dance before dead Englands Hearse
Every Night & every Morn
Some to Misery are Born
Every Morn and every Night
Some are Born to sweet delight
Some are Born to sweet delight
Some are Born to Endless Night
We are led to Believe a Lie
When we see not Thro the Eye
Which was Born in a Night to perish in a Night
When the Soul Slept in Beams of Light
God Appears & God is Light
To those poor Souls who dwell in Night
But does a Human Form Display
To those who Dwell in Realms of day"

From 'Auguries of Innocence' by William Blake