A saying I read on Dharmawheel - 'Ignorance has no beginning, but it has an end. Liberation has a beginning, but it has no end.' — Wayfarer

A nice one!

I agree that Buddhism is certainly not theistic if that term is taken to denote a purposely created cosmos.

By the way I also really liked the book To Meet the Real Dragon. I still have it on my shelves somewhere; way too many books! I sometimes wonder if accumulation of books would count as an unwholesome habit. :gasp:

Or any sort? Of course there is a logic to phenomenological analysis, but it is perhaps not always of the first order variety. There is a logic to metaphor as well as a logic to proposition-making.Different language games?

What? Wouldn't such an explanation have to presuppose a logic, a grammar in which it might be set out? — Banno

Yes, it's a profound (or trivial) truth that a language is needed. The question is, what kind of language?

Well, maybe I'm just as ignorant as Ciceronianus. – Das Man sneezes– "Gelassenheit!" :mask: — 180 Proof

I would never say you are an ignorant man; that's kinda cute, though!

(Look at how "being" is used in any language-game.) — 180 Proof

Phenomenology? Maybe it just doesn't do it for you. Have you looked at Braver's account of the commonalities between the early Heidegger and the late Wittgenstein?

I had a debate with I Like Sushi recently where he was insisting that Buddhism is 'theistic', because of the worship of deities such as celestial bodhisattvas and meditation Buddhas - even though Buddhism has always eschewed any notion of creator-God. — Wayfarer

It's an interesting point. I think it depends on what you mean by theism. True, Buddhism has no creator God, but it does have many gods and above all else an "omniscient one". It is at least deistic, although it does not propose that we derive our wisdom from the deities, should worship or appease them and so on. Homage is paid to the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, all of whom were once human. not sure if it is believed that the gods can become Bodhisattvas or Buddhas without becoming human first,

Why would you give the "thumbs-up" to the voice of ignorance?

Heidegger's analysis is phenomenological. If I recall you have little respect for phenomenology in general, so it probably wouldn't be to your taste. But critiquing phenomenological works in terms of first order logic is beside the point, totally misses it.

...so at the least you might critique the OP for misrepresenting Heidegger. — Banno

What makes you think @Xtrix has misrepresented Heidegger?

From my recollection, the five hindrances are admonitions about behaviours and psychological obstacles to liberation. I'd love to be able to report on what life is like when you're free of them, but no can do :fear: — Wayfarer

I found this to be a very clear exposition of the five hindrances: https://www.hillsidehermitage.org/new-book/

↪Janus
What?

The pretence is that somehow being - treated apparently as a thing - is structured by time.

Explain that. — Banno

That seems unfair, since I've answered very, very many questions concerning these folk, from you and from others. — Banno

The point is that at soon as the questions become critical of the ideas in question (criticisms which may or may not be apt), then the recourse is to "read the bloody text".

Heidegger does not treat being as a thing; but there is no point trying to explain that to someone who has not read his work.

His work may not be to your taste; it may have nothing for you, you wouldn't know until you made a real effort to read and understand it. It is not sound judgement to conclude from your superficial understanding of it which is due to your apparently total lack of interest in it, that that it contains no insight for others. Where you may merely lack interest, others :wink: make a weird fetish out of detesting Heidegger.

I quite agree. I think it's spectacularly silly to study or treat being as if it is a thing, and so am silly in doing so. — Ciceronianus

I agree, but this is not an apt criticism of Heidegger, as he does not treat being as a thing.

Heidegger analyzes being as Dasein; "being there" or "there being", which he understands to be the primordial nature of human being.

He also was the first to show that the being of things in the world as sheer opaque presence is not prior to their being as transparently ready to hand for us.

I agree; Being and Time is not so difficult. His work after the "die Kehre" I have thus far found impenetrable.

In past discussions of rigid designation and reference, conceptual schemes and the PLA, I've asked you for simple explanations of just what you think Kripke, Davidson and Wittgenstein are claiming; and your response has always been "Read the bloody text": so...

:up: :lol:

I appreciate that his ideas are difficult to grasp, but I think the muddle is in your reading rather than in his ideas. — Joshs

I'll second that.

We respond to the hindrances otherwise they would not hinder us, no? I thought the idea is pretty standard Buddhist fare. I just performed a search and found plenty of references. Here's one on the top of the list:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_hindrances

The question is as to whether it is really possible (and desirable) to permanently cease responding to them, i.e. become liberated from them. Why would you try unless you believed it is possible?

The reference is to Freud's idea that the goal of psychotherapy is to overcome being neurotically miseable and instead be ordinarily unhappy. — baker

Freud was a pessimist. Happiness/ unhappiness: it's a matter of perspective.

I actually don't know a canonical reference for this. — baker

I'm not claiming there is. But I see no reason to think anyone would attempt to give up responding to the five hindrances if they didn't believe that liberation from them is possible (and desirable!). That said: world-weariness may do the trick I suppose.

Nice play on "reel"! Strangely, I wrote a poem a few years ago called The Reel with a similar play in mind.

The Reel

For the duration of a bounded eternity
They had only been dreaming
Dreaming of thinking, dreaming of endless presuppositions
And propositions of the standing imagination
overarching the bristling forests of sense
from the unencompassed watershed mountains
from the quiet inceptions to the teeming outcomes
soon lost, all lost to the unstoppable flood of dreams

and it wasn’t reckoned, not by them
nor how ancient the dripping frond, emerging lung
and the perapatetic neurons, and what lay hidden
inside the cave, what arachnid net of confusion
carefully and skillfully woven, notwithstanding flaws
and although it seemed the fatal dreams must bend
or end as they had before many, many times
yet in the end they wouldn’t, they couldn’t in the end

and nothing, nothing remained undreamed
in all the deserts of impossibility the oases
or hovering mirages of possibility drew the feet
drew the swelling tongues and ignited infernos
in the instructed rawness, in structured throats
in all the vessels, large and small that flood
the roar of blood, and float like pimples
across the encompassing stream

yet nothing weighed so, in the unified organ
as was quickly and repeatedly remembered
and forgotten, where the bolt that shot
from heart to head tortured the once idle
hands, nails then tore at the skein of mortality
and overturned the bed of world-weariness
now they are all flipped-out and never tired
calling for the impossible to be served

all the while the neurons are constellated like armies
mounting a series of campaigns against
an invincible foe for the imagined benefit
of loyalty to preposterous benefactors
and the matrix is disheveled, sliding into ruin
other previously neglected bits of the dream
pop up here, there and everywhere and not
unfortuitously, given the gloaming

when the missions were ranged all along
the rivers, and the sedition of the dreams
were simply overwhelmed they had to remember
to forget the lure of the ancestral
they thought it didn’t really matter then, as nothing
really does now, for the moving pictures displaying
against billions of darkened backdrops
were the sum of revelations on the available reel.

It is not "ordinary unhappiness" (for me at least: I cannot speak for you). It is a mix of up and down. I am familiar with the Buddhist idea of learning to cease to respond to the "five hindrances", but you will not be motivated enough to do that unless you have become convinced that liberation from them is actually possible.

:up:

OK, I didn't remember that, but it's years since I read it. If I can find the reading time I'll take another look.

Janus: Collingwood is not a metaphysician.
T Clark: Why not?
Janus: Because he's wrong.
T Clark: Why is he wrong?
Janus: Because he's not a metaphysician. — T Clark

No, that's not what I;m saying at all. I'll correct it for you so you can better understand what I am saying.

Janus: Collingwood is not a metaphysician.
T Clark: Why not?
Janus: Because he's not doing anything that would conventionally be considered, according to either the ancient or modern conceptions, metaphysics.

And so Collingwood doesn't really count as a metaphysician, whatever else you might think he counts as. At most he counts as a kind of historian or historiographer of metaphysical thought, which as I have already pointed out, is not the same thing as a metaphysician.

I don't think I get your point. — T Clark

That doesn't tell me anything unless you point to what you are not getting.

As far as I can tell, Collingwood's description of metaphysics is respected and still referenced 80 years later. Yet, you call it "unusual." Can you support your contention? — T Clark

Collingwood is not generally considered to be a central figure in the historical evolution of metaphysical thought.

As long as there is an infinite supply of those moments. — baker

Only needed if your demand is to be completely happy all the time.

:up:

There seem to be, broadly, two conventional definitions of metaphysics: the "traditional" and the "modern".

1. The Word ‘Metaphysics’ and the Concept of Metaphysics

2. The Problems of Metaphysics: the “Old” Metaphysics

2.1 Being As Such, First Causes, Unchanging Things
2.2 Categories of Being and Universals
2.3 Substance

3. The Problems of Metaphysics: the “New” Metaphysics

3.1 Modality
3.2 Space and Time
3.3 Persistence and Constitution
3.4 Causation, Freedom and Determinism
3.5 The Mental and Physical

Above are headings in the SEP article on metaphysics.

To my mind that does not read as a metaphysical statement at all, but as a methodological or historiographical statement.

The other point is that traditional metaphysics does not consist merely in "absolute presuppositions" whatever they might be, but in explicated systems. Sure you might say there are irreducible or groundless presuppositions or axioms that are the foundations of metaphysical systems, but that is also true of all empirical inquiries, ethics and aesthetics and even of the arts and crafts. I see those basic assumptions or axioms as being methodological, not metaphysical (excepting of course the grounding assumptions of metaphysics itself).

If you're asking whether Collingwood's understanding of metaphysics is a metaphysical position, the answer is "yes." — T Clark

So, what is its central tenet?

I have read An Essay on Metaphysics and I knew they were Collingwood's words. When you say that the distinction between studying the history of metaphysical ideas and adopting a metaphysical standpoint is not significant are you suggesting it is "a distinction without a difference"?

If so, I would ask you whether you cannot see that you could do one without the other, and that one necessarily involves some commitment to a view or views and the other doesn't, and that the difference between human activities which involve commitment to views and those which don't, is arguably of the greatest significance.

:ok:

This is only controversial if one takes interpreting to mean "uncertain" or "opinion." Of course there's a glass there, and a chair and a tree and the color red. But all of that is also partly subject-dependent. — Xtrix

I agree that what we see depends on us just as it depends on what is there; seeing is interactive. Animals also presumably see things as things (but not self-reflectively, since they have no language). I just think 'interpretation' is a problematic term to use in this context because it suggests a voluntary act that is somewhat arbitrary and could have been otherwise.

Sure, but that isn't accounting for the fact that others who have also studied and meditated long-term may disagree with you.

A glass being half full or empty is also an interpretation -- it doesn't mean there's no glass there. — Xtrix

That's not merely a perception of a glass with liquid in it, but a judgement. Of course we see a glass with liquid in it as a glass with liquid in it, but that is not an interpretation, it is an example of a basic understanding that is shared by all. We can build on that basic understanding and interpret the glass and liquid as arrangements of different kinds of atoms, but nonetheless we still see, and cannot but see, it as a glass with some liquid in it.

Generally I agree, although I don't understand the distinction you are making by calling it the history of metaphysics. — T Clark

Originally I responded to this:

Metaphysics is the attempt to find out what absolute presuppositions have been made by this or that person or groups of persons, on this or that occasion or groups of occasions, in the course of this or that piece of thinking. — T Clark

Attempting to find out "what absolute presuppositions have been made..." just is the study of the history of metaphysics. Making absolute presuppositions yourself is doing metaphysics (making metaphysical claims or adopting a metaphysical standpoint); so you have a distinction between studying the history of (other people doing) metaphysics and actually doing metaphysics..

Let's not forget that Collingwood was an historian.

So this, for example

Reality itself has a fundamentally subjective aspect, which is intrinsic, but is never knowable by objective means. — Wayfarer

is not studying the history of metaphysics, but rather making a particular metaphysical claim, selected from among many other possible metaphysical views on account of personal preference.

Is your claim that it is metaphysics all the way down itself a metaphysical or ontological, or a merely epistemological one? I'm not sure if you're being serious, but if so, my retort would be that there is no fact of the matter regarding what we should call the study of the history of metaphysics, which is what Collingwood refers to as just 'metaphysics'. There is, distinct from this historical study of metaphysics, the possibility of practicing metaphysical thinking which has no truck with any traditional metaphysics.

:lol: :up:

Do you think Carnap would agree that his work falls under the heading of metaphysics? Or is a matter of irony if it does? — Wayfarer

It would depend on the nature of the dismissal of metaphysics. If the claim was that talk of an eternal order is incoherent or meaningless then it might be considered to be a semantic claim. On the view that metaphysics is impossible because it is incoherent, without meaning, to speak, or at least make claims about, things which cannot be empirically tested, then no claim could rightly be considered to be a metaphysical claim.

Heidegger, who rejects traditional metaphysics (as Kant did) in a different way, unless I am mistaken, sees metaphysics as a subset of phenomenology (and hermeneutics) and on that view metaphysical ideas would be different ways of disclosing our experience of the world, and not propositions to be considered true or false. This view could perhaps be interpreted as being close to Collingwood's

Metaphysics is the attempt to find out what absolute presuppositions have been made by this or that person or groups of persons, on this or that occasion or groups of occasions, in the course of this or that piece of thinking. — T Clark

This seems wrong to me. Metaphysics consists in various "absolute presuppositions (that) have been made". So, doing metaphysics is making such presuppositions. Studying metaphysics (meta-metaphysics?) then is the study of, or "attempt to find out what absolute presuppositions have been made".

Metaphysics in its classic sense has always been understood to be the rational investigation of the eternal order. — StreetlightX


Whereas in a lot of modern thinking, the idea of there even being 'an eternal order' is passé. — Wayfarer

This is true, but the modern thinking that dismisses the idea of "an eternal order" is also a metaphysics. If you start from the twin assumptions that there is an eternal order and that human rationality alone is capable of discerning (and even understanding?) that order, then your efforts will be directed towards the goal of discerning and understanding that (purported) order.

On the other hand if you reject the idea of such an order, or reject the idea that such an order, even if it existed, could be purely discerned and understood by human rationality, then your metaphysics will consist in working out what seems to be the most plausible to think about the nature of the real in light of the whole movement of human thought and the sciences.