A synopsis and discussion of "ontocubism"

[Joshs]

@EQV

@Joshs

The same object is present twice, in two different relational contexts.

I think this depends on how we characterize “taking up.” Even granting that perception involves a phenomenal presentation constrained by the object, why suppose that this presentation must be a duplicate of the object?

It is one’s idea of the object which involves the assumption of duplication. That is to say, it involves a thinking of temporal repetition without qualitative change in the sense of what the object is. As you say “There is one object and a distinct presentation through which that object becomes cognitively accessible.” This is a thinking of temporal persistence in the sense of what the object is in itself, apart from its accessibility to a consciousness

@EQV

An identity is determinable only through its differences from other things, but a difference also seems to require enough identity or continuity for it to count as a difference rather than as sheer unrelatedness.

Identity is not necessary for continuity , consistency, similarity and relevance. These don’t depend on a pure ‘ I’ supposedly equal to itself, turning back to itself, iterating itself. We think we desire pure sameness when we think of the mathematical precision of science and its striving for correctness of fit and perfection of prediction. But pure empty repetition of the same is the very definition of the death of meaning. Meanwhile , treating difference as what lies next to and external to identity turns the very concept of difference into arbitrariness .

To argue as I am that difference is more fundamental than identity is to offer a new way to think about what difference means and does. If temporal repetition always alters what it repeats, including what resides in memory as what was ‘past’ , this alteration is never pure arbitrariness Differences are parasitic on prior differences rather than clean breaks from them. A difference always bears a relation to what it differs, but not in Hegel’s or Peirce’s dialectical sense of a subsuming and unifying historical development. Every difference implies a dimension of similarity to what came before.

When we understand such concepts as similarity, continuity, consistency and relevance in terms of a split between identities and differences, which we then glue back together externally, we perform the platonist move which leads to such confusions as as the split between subject and object, fact and value, the is and ought, the inner and the outer, and the split between emotion and reason underlying the hard problem.

Writers like Anscombe, Mcdowell and Peirce, following Kant, come some distance toward repairing this split , by making normativity central to nature as well as human reason. Causes are inseparable from larger fields of sense and intelligiblity. The myth of a naively given world of material identities is partially overcome in favor of the identity of normed systems in which subject and object are inseparably co-dependent.

@EQV

Can’t we grant qualitative transformation without saying that a numerically different rock is produced? If “numerically different” means a distinct individual, then a change in the rock’s qualities or in the sense it has within a configuration does not by itself entail numerical replacement. The category of rock will continue to hold itself together nicely as variations on a gently morphing theme.

How does a category like rock relate to the changes of its qualities? What does it mean to say that the ‘it’ remains the same while its qualities change? Why not say that our understanding of what the category ‘rock’ means changes very subtly alongside our discover of the qualitative changes within it? Isnt that how the sense of meaning of all our categories evolve? There’s no point in assigning a numeric value to the oh so subtle shifts in sense of our conceptual categories unless we intend to turn these values in identities and fall back into n the platonic trap we are trying to avoid.

This is in fact how we already implicitly treat the categorical identities in our world, and it doesn’t disrupt our ability to construct sciences and technologies which assume discrete identities in relation.

@EQV

What, on this account, grounds the distinction between the transformation of one persisting rock from the disappearance of one rock and the production of another?

Husserl wrote brilliant analyses of what prompts a shifts from the considering what we are doing as the elaboration of aspects of a self-identical thing to the difference between one thing and another. What his analyses reveal is that we can discern many different sorts of variations in the relative coherence and continuity of categories without having to ground these in the assumption of underlying identities. Identity for him is just one of many derivative species of relational similarity.

@EQV

You have explained how a world of continuous qualitative self-transformation could nevertheless appear relatively stable, but you haven’t explained why we should prefer that account to the more straightforward view that stability appears because identities are real.

Why interpret identity, equality, and subsistence as useful illusions generated by imperceptibly slow change, rather than as fallible concepts that track real continuities within change? What explanatory work does the stronger ontology of continual self-reinvention perform that an account of persisting but changing entities cannot?

I’m all for tracking real continuities within change , and placing my notion of difference as prior to identity achieves that reality more effectively than starting with pure identities and then understanding difference as an arbitrary tearing away from their internal unity.

You pay a heavy price for clinging to the empty abstraction of identity in the form of an ethic grounded in conformity, polarity and violence. How is an ethic of identity violent? I earlier mentioned Anscombe, Mcdowell, Kant and Peirce. They ensconce particularities of experience and nature within normative wholes, a space of reasons. But this rational tribunal depends on identity in the form of the realist ‘way things are’, the truth seen as adequation or conformity between judgement and a normed world. To conform to something is to re-present it adequately.

Such correspondence is incoherent whithout the assumption that what the mind conforms itself to was already there , and thus an identity. Writers like Dewey, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty say this is fine as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough . The normed identities which are the ground floor for truth for Kant et al function within meta-normative practices.

The material world our reasons attempt to conform themselves to is already bound up with our system of practices in that the world The real identities which seem to be the case for the Kantians and Hegelians are only the case within a practice which gives them sense and intelligibility, and it is in the nature of practices to repeat themselves by subtly. altering themselves and their sense.

From the vantage of practice-based theorists, the Kantian realists are fixated on truth , correctness and getting it right in their epistemology and ethics , and this always means forcing one particular set of contingent practices on others. Peirce thought that inquiry, if pursued indefinitely, converges toward a single opinion. That is what gives truth its objectivity.

Dewey doubts that inquiry should be understood as converging toward a fixed final opinion. Inquiry changes the world, creates new problems, generates new forms of experience, and transforms the inquirers themselves. The goalposts move because human life moves.

[Joshs]

@j_j

I can understand why a thinker might use the phrase “condition of possibility.” I’m reluctant to use it though, because it can be taken as a reification of being. So that being becomes a thing that makes other things possible.

I’d like to circumvent metaphysics-as-“explanation” as much as possible.

I can understand why you’re reluctant to use that phrase. Kant used ‘condition of possibility ’ , which many who followed after him rightly took to refer to a metaphysical ground. Contrast ‘condition’ with phenomenology as activity or Being in the world as event or any number of other practice-based approaches which begin from within the midst of temporal-historical-living context rather than claiming to locate an explanatory machinery working silently behind it. Many thinkers brought up in the Anglo-American tradition have a hard time understanding why the ‘grounding’ concepts of Derrida or Heidegger or Deleuze are not a slipping back into the attempt to metaphysically anchor philosophy. Rorty was one of these, accusing Heidegger and Derrida of a fondness for what he called ‘skyhooks’’.

I think he colossally missed the point. So I encourage you to circumvent metaphysics-as-“explanation”, but not in the direction of a misreading of the kinds of ‘quasi-transcendental’ discourses Continental philosophy has produced to talk about thinking and being , what Braver calls ‘groundless grounds’ . Derridean concepts like trace, deconstruction, difference and gramme are quite different from a ‘grand explanation’ even as they operate everywhere. Rorty tried to keep his approach ‘modest’ but one can locate central concepts in his work which operate everywhere, and one can do the same with your own work. This doesn’t mean those concepts won’t evolve, just that they operate as a whole.

One never overcomes idealism. The gestures of formalization and conceptualization sit side by side with empiricism and singularization.

@j_j

Conversation presupposes shared objects. But this “presupposition” is deep. We “enact” this faith constantly. In this very conversation, for instance, we discuss the “same” “intentional objects.

I don’t assume shared objects of conversation. I assume that my words will impinge on the other in ways that will lead to a response that I hope to be able to anticipate. Built into my anticipations are pre-knowledge about who I am speaking to and what I am speaking about. I can expect to be surprised by their response on some topics and only minimally so on others.

When I go from conversation with a stranger at a party to intimate engagement with my close friend to conversation with myself, I am moving through different intensities of intimacy of being changed by the other. I think of this discursive back and forth less as a sharing than as a varying, surfing the flow of change while trying to get into the zone of gently unfolding intimate novelty.

[EQV]

@Joshs

It is one’s idea of the object which involves the assumption of duplication. That is to say, it involves a thinking of temporal repetition without qualitative change in the sense of what the object is. As you say “There is one object and a distinct presentation through which that object becomes cognitively accessible.” This is a thinking of temporal persistence in the sense of what the object is in itself, apart from its accessibility to a consciousness

But if we’re willing to say that qualitative change is itself patterned, then it would seem that we are at least open to the possibility that it answers to a unifying intelligibility that could be grasped by the mind.

On that account, identity would not be a static content duplicated from moment to moment. Rather, it’s the intelligible unity of a process through its changes. On this view, to say that one object persists would not mean that it remains qualitatively identical “in itself,” only that its successive transformations belong to one dynamically organized history.

Why should recognizing such a unity amount to duplication rather than understanding the pattern immanent in the becoming itself?

@Joshs

We think we desire pure sameness when we think of the mathematical precision of science and its striving for correctness of fit and perfection of prediction. But pure empty repetition of the same is the very definition of the death of meaning. Meanwhile , treating difference as what lies next to and external to identity turns the very concept of difference into arbitrariness .

We don’t have to deny the constitutive role of difference in order to acknowledge the reality of identity. I feel like this is a false dilemma. A scientific law, for example, usually identifies an invariant pattern across qualitatively different cases. The differences are not erased; they are precisely what the invariant organizes and renders intelligible.

@Joshs

To argue as I am that difference is more fundamental than identity is to offer a new way to think about what difference means and does. If temporal repetition always alters what it repeats, including what resides in memory as what was ‘past’ , this alteration is never pure arbitrariness Differences are parasitic on prior differences rather than clean breaks from them. A difference always bears a relation to what it differs, but not in Hegel’s or Peirce’s dialectical sense of a subsuming and unifying historical development. Every difference implies a dimension of similarity to what came before.

My understanding was that Hegel did not begin with fixed identities and subsequently introduce external differences. I thought he said difference was internal to identity, identity differentiates itself, and that opposition is the unity of identity and difference. In that case, your description of difference as not merely external to identity seems remarkably Hegelian in spirit.

As for Peirce, I’m not sure I entirely recognize your representation of him. I take it that Peirce would fully agree with you that temporal development can involve the alteration of the habits and interpretive context through which the past itself is understood. I think the main difference between you and Peirce is that he is willing to acknowledge the reality of habits, generalities and continuities (irreducible thirdness) in a way that you seem reluctant to countenance.

@Joshs

From the vantage of practice-based theorists, the Kantian realists are fixated on truth , correctness and getting it right in their epistemology and ethics , and this always means forcing one particular set of contingent practices on others. Peirce thought that inquiry, if pursued indefinitely, converges toward a single opinion. That is what gives truth its objectivity.

I don’t see how this follows. I agree that the tradition is committed to truth, correctness and getting things right, but that need not take the form of dogmatic adherence to one contingent set of practices. To my mind, commitment to truth doesn’t preclude openness to revision, it requires it. We must remain open to the possibility that our present beliefs and practices are inadequate. Otherwise we risk stagnation.

Nor do I interpret Peirce’s ideal limit as a prescription for one comprehensive form of life or one fixed method of inquiry. His formulation in terms of one fated opinion can be read as provocative and aspirational rather than literalistic. I take it as expressing the hope that inquiry is answerable to something beyond what any finite individual or community currently believes. The convergence concerns the object of inquiry, not a uniformity of practice or expression.

I would interpret this as a heuristic norm governing inquiry: an orientation toward the intelligibility of Being. Inquiry anticipates that the world is sufficiently intelligible to constrain better and worse answers, but that anticipation does not specify beforehand what the answer will be or which concrete practices will prove adequate for reaching it.

[j_j]

@EQV

Otherwise, what basis do we have for distinguishing genuine disclosure from projection, fantasy, or ideological possession? It’s not that judgment is infallible, or that it guarantees agreement.

It’s reasonable to care about this stuff, and I also care about this stuff. I don’t see my sparse positivistic approach to philosophy as needing to worry about the nitty-gritty epistemological details. Different people will give different reasons for endorsing or rejecting the claims of others. I see such judgements as situated. This is itself a self-consciously risky situated judgment. So I neither offer a transpersonal criterion of validity or appeal to one in my proposed explication of our basic situation. Yet I hope that others will find my sparse approach reasonable.

As a person in the world, I might believe that a drug is safe and effective — enacting this belief by ingesting the drug — because I trust reports of its safe effectiveness on a sample that I take to be sufficiently representative. We could dig into the assumptions latent in this, if we wanted to. Or I might look up a musician recommended by a friend who previously recommended stuff that I ended up thinking was great.

[j_j]

@EQV

But I still think there’s value in distinguishing disclosure from knowledge. Something may be disclosed pre-discursively, but recognizing and affirming it as a disclosure of reality (I know you don’t like this word) still seems to require intellectual appropriation.

I don’t really mind the word “reality.” My rhetoric strategy is tangy perhaps in order to de-trivialize this word.

Perhaps we would both stress the ongoing dialectical disclosure of objects.

Of course I agree that something like a “filtering” is primary. Pierce stresses that priority of future conduct, especially non-verbal conduct. What should we do now ? Having experienced what we’ve experienced ?

I tend to read knowledge as warranted belief. In pragmatic terms, we might talk about a shrewd policy for conduct, both verbal and non-verbal. But I see judgments of warrant as situated. I think it makes the most sense to deal with such issues concretely and not at the level of “fundamental ontology” or positivistic-pragmatic explication. Basically I’m happy to get a better grip on the fundamental terms.

@EQV

That’s why I resist the conclusion that Being is simply and transparently given as “thus and so” independently of all inquiry and discernment.

Just for the sake of clarity, I see inquiry as an intense and sometimes painful wrestling. Existence is difficult. Being is precisely not trivially present. Prejudicial disclosure is essentially incomplete and partial. Indeed, I don’t think the “truth” of a situation or object ever arrives. But we often become confident enough to act without hesitation. I can’t prove that my spouse isn’t an agent from Neptune in a human suit, but it’s not something I worry about. It’s a logical possibility ( I can imagine it) but not a living possibility. I used a silly example for color, but you can imagine more realistic examples.

@EQV

Otherwise we’re left at the mercy of every crack-pot, fanatic and lunatic who claims to “speak on behalf of God”.

I should clarify more on this point too. Basically my sparse approach takes for granted in its audience the worldly wisdom of a “scientific worldview.”

The credulous and the fanatical will probably not bother to understand it and reject it if they do understand it.

It may come off as perverse, but I am really trying to dodge every hint of what Spengler called “ethical socialism.” I don’t want to be a podium man with a “cure” for the world’s “spiritual crisis” or “superstition.” This is not because I don’t care about the world, wouldn’t prefer a more civilized world.

@EQV

So, I’d be willing to grant that there is a broad sense in which every presentation discloses reality. It is a real encounter in which something becomes present. But there is also a narrower epistemic sense in which, I’d say, presentation alone does not disclose what reality “is”. It contributes to disclosure, but it does not, by itself, determine whether what appears is an enduring object, an illusion, a symbol, a projection, or something else. That’s where understanding and judgement are required.

We are basically on the same page. We both emphasize what we emphasize for our individual reasons.

@EQV

In that sense, presentation is not opposed to mediation. It is the event that calls out for mediation.

I think this is a fair way to put it. As you know, I’m a huge fan of Gadamer. Inquiry is a difficult separation of our projections from the object. The “true” object ( or “less false” object ) is the “result” of an ongoing filtration.

“Mediation” is not necessarily a bad word. Your might say that my projections are between me and the object.

@EQV

henomenal presentations can condition the occurrence of insight, but insight is not an act of conscious deduction or induction. Peirce spoke of abduction, but even he admitted that, in the limit case, insight comes to us involuntarily, “like a flash”. Lonergan analogizes the relationship between presentation and insight in terms of the classical relationship between matter and form — as form sublates matter into a higher intelligible unity, so insight sublates presentation.

I’m with you on this. I liked the little I read about Lonergan. I teach math, and I can very much relate to the flash of insight, both in myself and in students. Something “clicks.”

@EQV

But, in my opinion, the occurrence of insight itself cannot be voluntarily forced or reconstructed as a sequence of explicit, conscious, “inferential” steps.

I agree, and I’m somewhat scornful of the fetishization of formal methods. Popper is also good on this. A hypothesis is act of creativity. It happens to someone. Where does the poet get their poetry ? They may train their receptivity, but it just happens.

@EQV

And then there is judgement, which is the act that reflectively affirms (or denies) what insight proposes. The agent grasps that the conditions for the proposed insight are (or are not) fulfilled by the presentation (in conjunction with previously established judgments). This is where, in the successful case, I would say that the agent not only encounters an appearance, or entertains an idea, but actually meets the real.

But of course, there is no “sideways on”, God’s-eye-view from which the agent can determine whether or not they have achieved any success. This is where the agent must rely responsibly on their own capacities while remaining open to further evidence, criticism and correction — seeking feedback from the community and drawing on both personal and communal discernment to sift the true from the false.

This sounds good to me. I’m really not personally allergic to talk of reality, truth, and falsity.

I stress Bakhtin and the dialogical because it very much matters who I am talking to. The particular conversation determines which signs are appropriate.

Forums like this are tricky. The philosopher is typically expected to be monological, which is to say monumental in the sense of inscriptions on a public monument. “Tell me your literal beliefs.”

But “meaning” doesn’t work like that, not “really.”

The “podium pretense” or “pulpit presupposition” obscures this. My critique of logocentrism is less a critique of words themselves than of dominant beliefs about how they function and should function.

[j_j]

@EQV

A scientific law, for example, usually identifies an invariant pattern across qualitatively different cases. The differences are not erased; they are precisely what the invariant organizes and renders intelligible.

Right. Again I find an echo of the acoustic image. The singular is “intelligible” through its participation in a synthesis. But the “synthesis” is only “there” through or as the plurality of singular events. Yet this plurality is open, ajar, fundamentally futural. The “law” is primarily about the future, primarily a guide to future conduct.

[j_j]

@Joshs

I think he colossally missed the point. So I encourage you to circumvent metaphysics-as-“explanation”, but not in the direction of a misreading of the kinds of ‘quasi-transcendental’ discourses Continental philosophy has produced to talk about thinking and being , what Braver calls ‘groundless grounds’ .

I’m not eager to confess to a misreading. I’m instead interested in finding better and better words. We might say that “the ground is an abyss.” I like this phrase. But we should then unfold this aphorism for the curious.

As I see it, it’s only paraphrase that demonstrates to self and others that something has been appropriated. I see all appropriation as situated, so I don’t expect from others or strive in my own case for a lossless paraphrase.

I’m suspicious of a latent QM metaphor that I see associated with continental philosophy. The long dead philosophers who wrote in English — Hobbes, Mill, Pierce — are underrated.

I think we are largely on the same page when it comes to our fundamental vision. But our styles are different.

I think you tend to approach the posts of others in terms of their correctness or not about your favorite philosophers. Of course I will pipe up when one of my favorite philosophers is slandered, so I can relate.

I see myself as maybe more self-consciously trying to work from the slippery given. Of course I am very influenced by my heroes. But they are also my rivals. And I want to avoid the mistakes that I take them to have made. These mistakes are often simply rhetorical, and these mistakes are relative. A rhetorical strategy that made sense then no longer makes sense.

The “problem” with Rorty, who is great in many ways, is that he was a portly progressive do-gooding podium man. This fit his position in the world as it was then. He was a well-paid institution man. His devilry was a tactic. He even reminds me of the earnest G. B. Shaw, who wore the style of a Oscar Wilde as a device for fixing the world.

Note that I am not against Rorty’s values. But the “I’m fixing the world” persona doesn’t ring true for me these days. I’m ambivalently on Substack, and I’m continually disappointed by the hackneyed pose of the philosopher as wisdom-loving world-fixer with Deep Things to say about Society. To me it all looks like cosplay.

The “QM metaphor” is the idea that The Latest Thing is So Revolutionary. My objection is that the critique of metaphysics is more like a return to pre-theoretical existence. A “coming back to down to earth.” Derrida is great, but I find him most fascinating and believable in these terms. Some wacky theological mentalities made up some wild stuff about language and truth and science. And some other guy, embedded with that game, offered a devasting immanent critique, a wake up call. Which didn’t save the world from binaries via condescending grad students. But can help so-and-so, engaged on getting a grip on our fundamental situation, waste less time on this or that theoretical dead end.

@Joshs

One never overcomes idealism. The gestures of formalization and conceptualization sit side by side with empiricism and singularization.

What I mean by “idealism” is not so difficult to overcome. Indeed, it’s only a certain theoretical type that finds it tempting in the first place. “Idealism” is a theoretical candy, a bit like black licorice. The critique of idealism is a bit ridiculous. Because it’s the critique of an insincere non-enacted merely verbal belief. So it’s of no great importance.

Yet it matters to the few who are interested in the weird form of poetry on display in the first chapter “Of Man” in the Leviathan of Hobbes.

[j_j]

@Joshs

When I go from conversation with a stranger at a party to intimate engagement with my close friend to conversation with myself, I am moving through different intensities of intimacy of being changed by the other. I think of this discursive back and forth less as a sharing than as a varying, surfing the flow of change while trying to get into the zone of gently unfolding intimate novelty.

I’m surprised that you dislike the word “sharing” for this.

Music is a huge part of my life, and I love enjoying music with others. The music becomes more intense even through sharing its beauty and power with others.

I agree about differing intensities of intimacy. To me successful intimacy is a reason to stay alive.

[j_j]

@Corvus

Consciousness is not findable or point-able, as it is transcendent being. But it is the source of all mental events and manifestations. I can postulate others’ consciousness, if there were good close interactions, communications and sharing on the works of art, writings, speaking and coordination or co-operations because all consciousness belongs to the same world of noumena in its origin.

I can understand why someone would call it a “source.”

I have to stick to my guns here and insist that to me it only makes sense as the “being” of things.

I am “conscious” of the art work because it is “there” for me. It “is” for me.

I am only repetitive on this issue because I perhaps incorrectly believe that you don’t quite “hear” what I am saying. Of course you don’t owe this to me. I just think it’s a weird point, and I hope to see signs from you that give me a sense of really sharing this idea with you.

@Corvus

Sure. it is good to know where your take on it lies, so I could see where my take lie in the map.

Indeed. I really like your approach to conversation.

[j_j]

I add a few general comments about “ontocubism.”

I don’t love the name “ontocubism.” I think Fuch’s QBism is great, and the echo is accidental. It’s weirder that ontocubism is approximately a big picture version QBism. In other words, both offer something like ontological perspectivism in the attempt to get around the usual confusion about “mind” and “matter.”

I see my work as a footnote to my influences. I believe in it as an inch or two of progress. But it’s weird to live in 2026. The world is extra-fucked lately. Should I be bothered in the age of self-publishing and YouTube that I’ve never seriously considered sending a paper to a respectable journal ? Who cares ? If there is no money in it ? Does this kind of foolosophy matter ? To a few of us, yes, but in the same way that poetry matters.

The gates have fallen. The gatekeepers are vanquished. Or rather replaced by algorithms that scan the mob. Ads funded soap operas, and they fund the “independent researcher” too.

I find it amusing that even the peers of youngman Joyce felt that they were all too belated. The party was over. Let them stand in this storm of content, churned out by the gigabyte by the machines of maniacal oligarchs.

It seems to be weirdish at least to read and appreciate both Heidegger and J. S. Mill.

Okrent reads Heidegger toward pragmatism plausibly. But I find the academic treatment of pragmatism somewhat dissonant, because the spirit of pragmatism is anti-academic. I mean “academic” in the sense of “ivory tower.” It’s a delicate issue. I mean if you can get someone to pay you to read and write, well done ! And Heidegger \cap pragmatism is a nice topic.

[Corvus]

@j_j

I can understand why someone would call it a “source.”

Philosophy is a subject digging out for “source”, hence when we use the consciousness in daily life, we sometimes feel guilty of using the word “consciousness”, which is not point-able, not visible and nonphysical.

But then we immediately justify ourselves saying, consciousness is the source of all mental manifestations existing in transcendental world as transcendent pure mind which is prior to our senses, perception or understanding, then we have established some system in the idea how our mind works and why the way they do, and the guilty feeling of misusing the word “consciousness” vanishes.

@j_j

I have to stick to my guns here and insist that to me it only makes sense as the “being” of things.

“being” seems a good word following Heidegger’s tradition although it could sound tad physical in nature.

@j_j

I am “conscious” of the art work because it is “there” for me. It “is” for me.

To me, I perceive the art work initially as any mundane objects, but I need to return to it to get close to it, and try to get intimate to it by enjoying, analysing and feeling before converting to part of my consciousness.

Once the art work is in my consciousness, it is not the object in the world anymore. It is no longer “there”. It is in me. Hence I would say that aesthetic perception on the works of art is not same as normal daily perception on the mundane objects in the world. It requires repetitions and intimation.

@j_j

I am only repetitive on this issue because I perhaps incorrectly believe that you don’t quite “hear” what I am saying. Of course you don’t owe this to me. I just think it’s a weird point, and I hope to see signs from you that give me a sense of really sharing this idea with you.

We are repeating because we are different, according to Deleuze. It is perfectly natural and positive thing to do, and confirms the topic is not minor one in our consciousness. During the repetitions, new inspirations or ideas can always pop out from the receptacles of the beings and forms.

@j_j

Indeed. I really like your approach to conversation.

Same here on yours. The system is being built by the repetitions and differences. That is a fun part of philosophizing suppose.

[Joshs]

@j_j

I’m surprised that you dislike the word “sharing” for this

I wouldn’t say dislike. In fact, one of my favorite philosophers, the phenomenologist Jean-Luc Nancy, use the term ‘sharing out’ to depict human relations. Existence occurs as a plurality of singular beings exposed to one another. Their relation is a sharing-out, a spacing between them that both separates and connects them.

According to Nancy, we do not share a collective essence, identity, or spirit. What we share is precisely our exposure to one another and the world. Community is not fusion but coexistence. Sharing out (partage in French) is division without fragmentation. Beings are distinct from one another. It is also relation without fusion. Beings only exist only in their exposure to one another. And its community without common substance. Nothing identical is possessed in common. Meaning arises in the between, in the spacing that is shared.

[Joshs]

@j_j

As I see it, it’s only paraphrase that demonstrates to self and others that something has been appropriated. I see all appropriation as situated, so I don’t expect from others or strive in my own case for a lossless paraphrase

Is “All appropriation is situated” a general assertion or a particular appropriation of meaning? I might say it’s ‘all’ from my point of view, but then is ‘my point of view’ a general or particular articulation? When Wittgenstein says the general is a derived form of the particular, when he says each time we use a word we must see what it is doing here, right now, is he making a general assertion about ‘each time’?

Do we protect ourselves from sliding into grand metanarratives and metaphysical grounds by modestly adding that such is the case only for me from my vantage and could be otherwise for others? But then what do we make of the use of words like ‘all’, ‘every’ , ‘original’ , ‘a priori’ and ‘each’, and even words like ‘is’ , ‘we’ and ‘the’? Do we say they represent philosophical misunderstandings? But of course we do use these words, and they mean something for us, they do concrete things.

So we can make ‘all’ our utterances reflexive, acknowledging that their claim to generality is a contextually situated and particular use of ‘the general’ , the ideal, the formal. You are concerned that some Continental writers ( which ones? Derrida? Heidegger? Merleau-Ponty? Deleuze? Foucault? Nietzsche?) treat the particular as though it could be subsumed or captured within language of the general. Fine. Who am I to claim superior insight on these writers?’But let’s say you were to find a way to read them as offering a way to say how words work without grounding or explaining their particular instantiations via underlying or overarching generalities?

What you and I are after here isn’t competing to see who can get so and so ‘right’, but what language looks like , what it shows and how it shows it, when it takes into account its fundamental contingency.

(I would love it if you read this from Eugene Gendlin and tell me what you think: ‘Words Can Say How They Work’

https://focusing.org/gendlin/docs/gol_2087.html

@j_j

I think you tend to approach the posts of others in terms of their correctness or not about your favorite philosophers. Of course I will pipe up when one of my favorite philosophers is slandered, so I can relate

I’m not interested in correctness. I’m interested in opening up new possibilities of reading. All great philosophers have multiple camps of interpreters. One can read Nietzsche as a fascist, an existentialist or a postmodernist. I would never say that any of these readings are simply ‘incorrect’. But I find the postmodern Nietzsche to open up richer possibilities of thought for me.

That world is more intimate, intricate, surprising and exciting for me than the other two Nietzsches. And it gives me me options for coping with and connecting with others that the other two readings don’t. So when I present you with my preferred reading of Heidegger or Husserl, I’m not asking you to treat it as the ‘correct’ one. I want to know if you can understand what it is saying, how a Derridean Heidegger looks different from a Heidegger rendered by Sallis or Dreyfus.

I suppose I also hope you can see it as reasonably consistent with what you can discern from the text, but this is less important to me. Similarly, I am more interested in how you are owning your readings of Mach, Feuerbach and Mills than in whether they are ‘correct’. I want you to plant a picture of YOUR Mills or Mach, not ‘the’ Mills and Mach. I want to be inducted into the possibilities your painting opens up.

@j_j

The “QM metaphor” is the idea that The Latest Thing is So Revolutionary. My objection is that the critique of metaphysics is more like a return to pre-theoretical existence. A “coming back to down to earth.” Derrida is great, but I find him most fascinating and believable in these terms. Some wacky theological mentalities made up some wild stuff about language and truth and science. And some other guy, embedded with that game, offered a devasting immanent critique, a wake up call. Which didn’t save the world from binaries via condescending grad students. But can help so-and-so, engaged on getting a grip on our fundamental situation, waste less time on this or that theoretical dead end.

Do you suppose QM got that from Kuhn’s book on scientific revolutions? Let me just riff for a couple minutes on ‘revolution’. There are teleological notions of revolution originating with German Idealism, shaping the concept of the avant garde in the arts and in politics, particularly of the Marxist variety. These assume progress as a rational dialectical development toward an end which unifies and totalizes.

Postmodern thinking puts this teleology into question, arguing that the criteria of terms like betterment, emancipation, liberation, improvement and progress don’t stand outside or prior to the social organizations within which these criteria get their sense. Most QM physicists who use Kuhnian terms like paradigm shift or scientific revolution read Kuhn through a Hegelian lens or pre-Hegelian lens, seeing revolution in terms of emancipatory progress. They are much more likely to in line with Popper’s Kantian notion of progress than with Kuhn’s postmodern treatment of it.

I’m not sure whether you meant revolution in the teleological or the postmodern sense, or both. If both, do you feel the notion of incommensurability among scientific theories is take too seriously? Do relativity and qm inhabit a different world than the world of Newtonian mechanics? Do Maga supporters and postmodern anarchists inhabit different worlds?

You say that the critique of metaphysics is like a return to pre-theoretical existence. But how should we understand the theoretical as a deviation from or corruption of a pre-theoretical origin? And what are we to make of the ‘return to’ this origin?

Isnt a theoretical, metaphysical narrative bound up with a culture’s system of discursive and material practices? As Joseph Rouse puts it, theoretical, artistic , technological and other creative practices are biological niches we co-construct and inhabit. Calling any particular niche or form of life’ wacky’ and ‘made up wild stuff’ seems to under appreciate the dependence of any form of thought on its place within a network of practices, and the fact that any critique of such practices takes place from within a new set of practices which depend and emerge from the former practices even as they consider them wacky and wild.

My point is that if words are how they work in context , if contexts emerge within forms of life, and if forms of life themselves undergo slow but relentless change, then there is no proper or natural or original mode of experience to return to. In attempting to get back , we are always moving forward , working to erect new niches of sense from the sediments of the wacky and wild past we now critique as having been a mere waste of time.

[EQV]

Wanted to offer up a response to this as well:

@Joshs

How does a category like rock relate to the changes of its qualities? What does it mean to say that the ‘it’ remains the same while its qualities change? Why not say that our understanding of what the category ‘rock’ means changes very subtly alongside our discover of the qualitative changes within it? Isnt that how the sense of meaning of all our categories evolve? There’s no point in assigning a numeric value to the oh so subtle shifts in sense of our conceptual categories unless we intend to turn these values in identities and fall back into n the platonic trap we are trying to avoid.

This is in fact how we already implicitly treat the categorical identities in our world, and it doesn’t disrupt our ability to construct sciences and technologies which assume discrete identities in relation.

Generally speaking, I would say that individuals undergo changes, while categories articulate intelligible patterns exhibited in those changes. To recognize that an individual rock persists is not to claim that it remains qualitatively unchanged. Instead, we locate its changing states within a materially embodied, causally continuous history. Geological categories allow us to understand precisely which transformations are characteristic of just such a history.

That said, I agree with you that our understanding of the category “rock” can change as inquiry develops. But we do not need to revise the category every time an individual rock undergoes a change, so long as that change conforms to known patterns. The possibility of category revision is occasioned when observations cannot be adequately integrated with existing knowledge.

That distinction between expected variation and anomalous observation is part of what makes learning and discovery possible. If every variation transformed the meaning of a category, it would be difficult to distinguish between learning something about an individual rock, and learning something new about “rocks” in general. This distinction seems difficult to articulate in the view you’ve described.

Patterns themselves may develop, and the development of one pattern may be explained through a more comprehensive pattern. Randomness may play a role in such development without rendering it unintelligible.

As for avoiding the Platonic trap, the trick is to resist the reification of categories into entities that exist separately from their concrete embodiments. The pattern is understood to be immanent in the individual, while each individual is understood to be a particular materially and historically situated realization of that pattern. Categories, then, are neither timeless forms, nor arbitrary constructions. They are revisable articulations of real patterns encountered in concrete things and processes.

[EQV]

@j_j

It’s reasonable to care about this stuff, and I also care about this stuff. I don’t see my sparse positivistic approach to philosophy as needing to worry about the nitty-gritty epistemological details. Different people will give different reasons for endorsing or rejecting the claims of others. I see such judgements as situated. This is itself a self-consciously risky situated judgment. So I neither offer a transpersonal criterion of validity or appeal to one in my proposed explication of our basic situation. Yet I hope that others will find my sparse approach reasonable.

I agree, and my point was less about trying to vouchsafe some kind of transpersonal method to decide all cases and more about the necessity of insight and judgement in the economy of personal cognition. The way I articulated myself suggested the more grandiose reading, but really all I meant to say was that, at the end of the day, personal insight and judgment are the only tools at the individual’s disposal for separating fact from fiction, reason from rationalization, authenticity from duplicity, etc. while fully acknowledging that the application of those tools is fraught and fallible.

@j_j

Perhaps we would both stress the ongoing dialectical disclosure of objects.

Yes, and well said. I think that’s something we can agree on.

@j_j

I tend to read knowledge as warranted belief. In pragmatic terms, we might talk about a shrewd policy for conduct, both verbal and non-verbal. But I see judgments of warrant as situated. I think it makes the most sense to deal with such issues concretely and not at the level of “fundamental ontology” or positivistic-pragmatic explication. Basically I’m happy to get a better grip on the fundamental terms.

I agree. Warrant is something to wrestle with and to negotiate. It’s not something that was chiseled into stone tablets at the dawn of time.

@j_j

Just for the sake of clarity, I see inquiry as an intense and sometimes painful wrestling. Existence is difficult. Being is precisely not trivially present. Prejudicial disclosure is essentially incomplete and partial. Indeed, I don’t think the “truth” of a situation or object ever arrives. But we often become confident enough to act without hesitation. I can’t prove that my spouse isn’t an agent from Neptune in a human suit, but it’s not something I worry about. It’s a logical possibility ( I can imagine it) but not a living possibility. I used a silly example for color, but you can imagine more realistic examples.

I agree with so much of this. The only place I’d push back, perhaps, is in the denial that the “truth” ever arrives. I can appreciate the sentiment, and our difference may be more semantic than substantial, but I want to allow for the possibility that the “truth” arrives, even if we are never in a position to verify this with absolute certainty. Personally, I see the anticipation of such a possibility as part of what motivates inquiry in the first place. That’s not to deny other motivations their due, but to express something like the “hope” you mentioned in a previous post. Call it misplaced optimism if you will, but I find it problematic to believe that inquiry answers to nothing more than the desire for power, status, wealth, sex, etc.

@j_j

It may come off as perverse, but I am really trying to dodge every hint of what Spengler called “ethical socialism.” I don’t want to be a podium man with a “cure” for the world’s “spiritual crisis” or “superstition.” This is not because I don’t care about the world, wouldn’t prefer a more civilized world.

Right. Not sure if you would agree, but I am reading what you said here as an expression of authentic humility rather than apathy.

@j_j

I think this is a fair way to put it. As you know, I’m a huge fan of Gadamer. Inquiry is a difficult separation of our projections from the object. The “true” object ( or “less false” object ) is the “result” of an ongoing filtration.

I am familiar with Gadamer only at second hand, but you’re inspiring me to take a deeper look. Any suggestions?

[Joshs]

@EQV

To recognize that an individual rock persists is not to claim that it remains qualitatively unchanged. Instead, we locate its changing states within a materially embodied, causally continuous history. Geological categories allow us to understand precisely which transformations are characteristic of just such a history.

The concern of practice-based writers like Husserl, Heidegger, Wittgenstein and Gadamer is that material embodiment doesn’t impose itself on subjects but belongs to systems of interactions and practices on the basis of which we do things with the world. The constraints the world imposes aren’t external to these systems but get their sense from within them. This includes concepts like ‘cause’.

@EQV

I find it problematic to believe that inquiry answers to nothing more than the desire for power, status, wealth, sex, etc.

Inquiry answers to questions formed out of patterns of practical embodied engagement with the world. A causally continuous history gets its sense from within a particular practical system of intelligibility. The natural causal history of a thing is a different sort of history than the history of changing cultural conceptions of the meaning of ‘cause’. The former history is the regurgitation of an already conceived model of causation. The latter history reveals how changing practices lead to the genesis of and transformation of what causation means and how it functions. Eliminative materialism and other reductive positivisms only recognize the former, ahistorical notion of natural history.

@EQV

If every variation transformed the meaning of a category, it would be difficult to distinguish between learning something about an individual rock, and learning something new about “rocks” in general. This distinction seems difficult to articulate in the view you’ve described.

I would like to think that every time you learn something new about a rock it causes a slight adjustment to your conception of the category ‘rocks in general’. Categories don’t just enclose, they tell us what is possible. Any newly discovered attribute in any individual member of a category immediately redefines and expands what is possible for the category as a whole. If that were not the case, we would not recognize that variation as belonging to the category. Over time, such incremental modifications the meaning of the category leads us to realize that we have ventured far from the original possibilities the category was designed to encompass.

[Joshs]

@EQV

But if we’re willing to say that qualitative change is itself patterned, then it would seem that we are at least open to the possibility that it answers to a unifying intelligibility that could be grasped by the mind.

I don’t see the mind over here and the world over there, such that we have to work to grasp it or make it intelligible. We find ourselves already immersed and embedded within it via our activity within it. The question isn’t whether we can make it intelligible, but how the sense of meaning, intelligibility and relevance changes in different situations.

@EQV

to say that one object persists would not mean that it remains qualitatively identical “in itself,” only that its successive transformations belong to one dynamically organized history.

Why should recognizing such a unity amount to duplication rather than understanding the pattern immanent in the becoming itself

This is fine as long as we are careful not to assume that a dynamically organized history becomes according to a dialectical logic which is assumed before the fact. What it means to become must be allowed to change its criteria as it becomes, such that ‘ getting closer and closer to the truth’ can’t be assumed to have an already defined sense.

@EQV

We don’t have to deny the constitutive role of difference in order to acknowledge the reality of identity. I feel like this is a false dilemma. A scientific law, for example, usually identifies an invariant pattern across qualitatively different cases. The differences are not erased; they are precisely what the invariant organizes and renders intelligible.

Let’s imagine a hierarchically organized system of constructs. At the most subordinate level are the minutia of perceptual phenomena that my perceptual system is confronted with every moment. i have never seen the exact same bit of experience before, so at this lowest level of construal everything in my world is a ufo. But at slightly higher levels of construal I have available to me categories which can subsume the variations of that lower levels within normative constancies designed to accommodate them.

At still more superordiate levels are more complex concepts that organize and subsume a wide range of disparate experiences within overarching value-driven understandings, goals and purposes. I would call these normative constructs identities if they functioned as static algorithms which had an existence partially independent of the particulars of experience they assimilate, organize and unify.But I am assuming them to only have their existence when they are being employed, and in their employment they are modified by the very particularities and variations they are designed to assimilate.
So there is nothing identical to itself here. It is a system always in motion with respect to itself.

@EQV

My understanding was that Hegel did not begin with fixed identities and subsequently introduce external differences. I thought he said difference was internal to identity, identity differentiates itself, and that opposition is the unity of identity and difference. In that case, your description of difference as not merely external to identity seems remarkably Hegelian in spirit.

My approach is Hegelian up to a point, and that point is where he totalizes differences within an overarching scheme of final unification.

@EQV

As for Peirce, I’m not sure I entirely recognize your representation of him. I take it that Peirce would fully agree with you that temporal development can involve the alteration of the habits and interpretive context through which the past itself is understood. I think the main difference between you and Peirce is that he is willing to acknowledge the reality of habits, generalities and continuities (irreducible thirdness) in a way that you seem reluctant to countenance.

Peirce’s notion of firstness is non-relational. That’s a non-starter for me. There are no qualities of sense or sensation which have any ontological status outside of or before their ensconsement within larger patterns of sense which are continually being modified by social engagement. As for thirdness, habits , generalities and continuities repeat themselves by altering themselves. They continue to be themselves differently.

@EQV

I agree that the tradition is committed to truth, correctness and getting things right, but that need not take the form of dogmatic adherence to one contingent set of practices. To my mind, commitment to truth doesn’t preclude openness to revision, it requires it. We must remain open to the possibility that our present beliefs and practices are inadequate.

And on the basis of what criteria of empirical validity and method of investigation can we judge our present beliefs to be inadequate? Does Popper’s or Lakatos’ answer satisfy you, or would you accept Kuhn’s or Feyerabend’s approaches? Peirce would likely prefer Lakatos and reject the following form Kuhn:

A scientific theory is usually felt to be better than its predecessors not only in the sense that it is a better instrument for discovering and solving puzzles but also because it is somehow a better representation of what nature is really like. One often hears that successive theories grow ever closer to, or approximate more and more closely to, the truth. Apparently generalizations like that refer not to the puzzle-solutions and the concrete predictions derived from a theory but rather to its ontology, to the match, that is, between the entities with which the theory populates nature and what is “really there.”

Perhaps there is some other way of salvaging the notion of ‘truth’ for application to whole theories, but this one will not do. There is, I think, no theory-independent way to reconstruct phrases like ‘really there’; the notion of a match between the ontology of a theory and its “real” counterpart in nature now seems to me illusive in principle. Besides, as a historian, I am impressed with the implausability of the view. I do not doubt, for example, that Newton’s mechanics improves on Aristotle’s and that Einstein’s improves on Newton’s as instruments for puzzle-solving. But I can see in their succession no coherent direction of ontological development.

[j_j]

@Corvus

“being” seems a good word following Heidegger’s tradition although it could sound tad physical in nature.

I tend to understand Heidegger to be criticizing this “physical” approach to understanding the sign “being” to refer to a stuff.

The “is-ness” of a thing is not stuff. That’s one way to phrase it. The confusion — as I see it — about consciousness is this tendency to theorize about this or that kind of basic ingredient of reality.

More generally, the “problem” is that words like “being” function uncritically and automatically in a community. You might say that there is no obvious word for pointing at the “here-it-is-ness” of things.

But I am “conscious” of something “because” here-it-is-for-me.

@Corvus

Once the art work is in my consciousness, it is not the object in the world anymore. It is no longer “there”. It is in me. Hence I would say that aesthetic perception on the works of art is not same as normal daily perception on the mundane objects in the world. It requires repetitions and intimation.

I agree that art doesn’t give all of itself as once. For me, it makes more sense to say that the art shows a certain face to you in a certain moment. That face is not inside you. You still experience the art as the art. But you also know that you only have a “moment” of the art, and that the art shows other faces to others and even other faces to you at some other time.

@Corvus

We are repeating because we are different, according to Deleuze. It is perfectly natural and positive thing to do, and confirms the topic is not minor one in our consciousness. During the repetitions, new inspirations or ideas can always pop out from the receptacles of the beings and forms.

I completely agree with you on this.

@Corvus

Same here on yours. The system is being built by the repetitions and differences. That is a fun part of philosophizing suppose.

Yes indeed !

[j_j]

@Joshs

Is “All appropriation is situated” a general assertion or a particular appropriation of meaning? I might say it’s ‘all’ from my point of view, but then is ‘my point of view’ a general or particular articulation? When Wittgenstein says the general is a derived form of the particular, when he says each time we use a word we must see what it is doing here, right now, is he making a general assertion about ‘each time’?

That’s a great question — and a question I am prepared for.

An “idea” (in the sense of the “meaning” of an assertion ) is roughly a blurry equivalence class of unrepeatable expressions.

The general is the open ongoing unity of quasi-equivalent particulars. Saussure’s sound-image is a local specification of ( my reading of ) Plato’s idea.

This is the discovery of fundamental ontology. At least it is the basic structural discovery. It is the issue of the one and the many.

Philosophy is in the business of time-conquering generalizations. Its topic is what endures. This thesis is itself philosophical or ontological. Philosophy also explicates itself.

@Joshs

Do we protect ourselves from sliding into grand metanarratives and metaphysical grounds by modestly adding that such is the case only for me from my vantage and could be otherwise for others?

I think perhaps that you are reading my perspectivism as a sentimental pose. For me it has nothing to do with that. I relate as an artist to the work of Richard Serra. In this case my art is a sketch of the structure of objects which includes a theory or anti-theory of consciousness.

@Joshs

What you and I are after here isn’t competing to see who can get so and so ‘right’, but what language looks like , what it shows and how it shows it, when it takes into account its fundamental contingency.

So we agree. But it’s worth noting that we thereby take “language” to have a between-us-ness or transcendence. We both try to hold ourselves responsible to the object. We even hold our favorite influences responsible to the object.

I really like this passage from the Gendlin link:

We think not only formulated thoughts, just this and just that and just that other. Cumulatively our steps of thought arrive; they make a point. At the end you say “See …?” You expect me to see (feel, have, understand, grasp, be …) not just this and that and that other, but … What makes the difference between getting the point, as against not getting it? It is the … which performs that role.

And if I don’t get it, then you have to say your point another way. You pause; you recollect your point, and new phrases come to lead to it. So your point is not the first set of phrases, nor the second. Your point is what you focus on to try for new phrases. The fact that you can try to rephrase it shows that what we call the point — is not a formulation; it is a …

[j_j]

@Joshs

That world is more intimate, intricate, surprising and exciting for me than the other two Nietzsches. And it gives me me options for coping with and connecting with others that the other two readings don’t. So when I present you with my preferred reading of Heidegger or Husserl, I’m not asking you to treat it as the ‘correct’ one. I want to know if you can understand what it is saying, how a Derridean Heidegger looks different from a Heidegger rendered by Sallis or Dreyfus.

I like this way of framing it. I think it’s best to be open about how ultimately interpersonal this kind of conversation is.

I continue to claim that we want to share in high things. It might be foolosophy. It might be music. Does the other person also “see” it ? And the other can also point me to high things that I haven’t yet noticed. But sometimes we show up to a party that refuses to start. Our pointing fails. And others might say that their pointing failed, that we were “blind” or “deaf” to what they offered.

As far as Nietzsche goes, I think I have picked out quite a few of my favorite passages. I did this with a sense of hinting at something. I scrawled my muted post horn.

A faith of this sort is not furious, it does not denounce, it does not defend itself: it does not come with “the sword”—it does not realize how it will one day set man against man. It does not manifest itself either by miracles, or by rewards and promises, or by “scriptures”: it is itself, first and last, its own miracle, its own reward, its own promise, its own “kingdom of God.” This faith does not formulate itself—it simply lives, and so guards itself against formulae…
…
It is only on the theory that no word is to be taken literally that this anti-realist is able to speak at all. Set down among Hindus he would have made use of the concepts of Sankhya, and among Chinese he would have employed those of Lao-tse—and in neither case would it have made any difference to him.—With a little freedom in the use of words, one might actually call Jesus a “free spirit”—he cares nothing for what is established: the word killeth, whatever is established killeth. The idea of “life” as an experience, as he alone conceives it, stands opposed to his mind to every sort of word, formula, law, belief and dogma.
…
The “kingdom of heaven” is a state of the heart—not something to come “beyond the world” or “after death.” … The “kingdom of God” is not something that men wait for: it had no yesterday and no day after tomorrow, it is not going to come at a “millennium”—it is an experience of the heart, it is everywhere and it is nowhere…

I read this as largely a portrait of Nietzsche rather than of Jesus, and I connect it to Leaves of Grass and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

@Joshs

I am more interested in how you are owning your readings of Mach, Feuerbach and Mills than in whether they are ‘correct’. I want you to plant a picture of YOUR Mills or Mach, not ‘the’ Mills and Mach. I want to be inducted into the possibilities your painting opens up.

I appreciate your attitude on this issue. I hope I come across as trying to do that. I wish had more time, because I’d enjoy writing a little book just on Mill’s phenomenalism. But I have got it said in my messy way.

It’s “all right there” in the structure of the empirical-perceptual object. Mill achieved a genuine phenonenalism — genuinely beyond the theo-materialism of Berkeley — and later thinkers enriched the basic grip in terms of Mill’s “enduring interpersonal possibility.”

I like the phrase “as possibility rather than substance.” An author’s work is a vector that points toward a future refinement and enrichment.