A synopsis and discussion of "ontocubism"

Metaphysics & Epistemology
81

I think you may be misunderstanding the point of the epoche. It is valuable tool for Heidegger and Derrida as well as Husserl. Bracketing our preconceptions allows us to distinguish what is primary and irreducible from what is secondary and derived. You perform your own epoche when you dig beneath concepts like symbol, the physical and consciousness to expose their conditions of possibility.

What Husserl is trying to reveal in bracketing an intersubjective world of persons is not an underlying pathological condition of chaos but the fact that what makes possible then shared understanding of a discursive forum of persons is a more primordial and originary forum of intersubjectivity within the ‘person’, the communication between myself and myself. If there were not already a synthetic constituting process allowing for a meaningful continuity from moment to moment in my sense of myself and my world, then hermeneutic agreement among persons would not be possible, because the latter depends on and is constituted at a higher level out of the former . A forum of persons defined as empirico-biological facts are subjective , contingent and relative, and could be conceived other than how our current sciences understand them. But the underlying processes of intersubjectivity which operate prior to any claimed factual distinction between persons in an empirical world are irreducible

So in his thought experiment in which we bracket out , or ‘annihilate’ the empirical world and the world of other persons, Husserl is showing that we dont end up in meaningless, pathological chaos, but in a more restricted but still meaningful, relevant and intricate world of correlated harmonies and similarities.

Derrida takes from Husserl the absolute fundamentality of the role of time, arguing that because I am temporal, I am always other than myself , and other to myself, from moment to moment, even as I can continue to say ‘I’. My relation to other ‘persons’ in terms of what we share and what differentiates us, is subtended by this more primary otherness within the ‘I’.

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82

Let’s talk a little more about the forum.

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83

Let’s talk a little more about the forum. Hermeneuticists might argue that incommensurability among worldviews rests on a wider field of commensurability, which always makes it possible for potential combatants to ‘agree to disagree’, and to enter into conversation in pursuit of a fusion of horizons. But others could push back against this optimist view without denying that others are always intelligible to us in some general sense. To agree to disagree there must be more than a n mm shared understanding that we are both human beings , we are both speaking English, and that we both have needs and desires.

Some are convinced that all that is required to achievek mutual intelligibility is for people of good will to agree to sit down together and commit themselves to trying to understand the other’s point of view. But while I believe an effective and thoroughgoing subsuming of another’s perspective in terms they would endorse is in principle achievable, in practice it is out of reach for the vast of humanity. Why should this be so if we are hermeneutically, discursively entangled?

Because we are entangled within metaphysical worldviews whose very relational normativity provides them with a robustness and resistance to radical change that precludes sudden dramatic conversion of belief. Change in belief happens all the time, but it takes place within larger normative frameworks. We hermeneuticists and phenomenologist may dream of converting Humeans, followers of David Lewis , eliminative materialism and metaphysical realism whose ethical implications we see as encouraging the very incommensurabilities and violences they aim to countervene with their approaches to morality, but the gap between Hume and Heidegger is too wider to eliminate with conversation.

Better to meet the Humean on their own terms and at the edge of their own thinking.

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84

We have been dividing the world into the quantitative and the qualitative since Galileo, giving precedence to the quantitative when we seek explanation – i.e. we cut the world in two and try to account for it in terms of only half of itself. This proved to be a very fertile methodology, but developments since the start of the last century have provided something of a rude awakening. It’s a matter of wonder and fascination, I think, that keeps me engaged with these issues.

If we are constructing our history, as recent developments suggest, then the big bang is a fairly recent addition to that structure – our story is being continually generated in the here and now, and not in some distant past in Rovelli’s “thermal time.” The theoretical physicist faces an enormous challenge to his program of reverse engineering the cosmos.

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85

I interpret your view as pertaining to objects in the world (signs?) and the way they present only partially in any particular ‘face’ of the world – splintered into many different aspects, never perceived in their entirety but only conceived as such, always having a hidden side. in perception. Also as rejecting the idea of a transcendent object that somehow binds together all these fragments. What binds them together is the forum – inter-subjective agreement – necessitating the existence of other ‘faces.’ Please correct any misinterpretations so that I can hone my understanding.

The plurality of personal worlds invites the question of whether their relations are external or internal (Leibniz or Whitehead). I suspect the proposition that ‘faces’ are nodes in a relational network might expose this choice as a misconception. Are we approaching the same territory from different directions?

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86

I think Lewis takes the god’s POV (Nagel’s “view from nowhere”) as a theoretical construct representing the totality of propositional truths. His argument is that this totality is insufficient for self-knowledge (locatedness in a world), regardless of whether a human can actually achieve it.

The impression I get is that Nagel’s argument against physicalism is like Jackson’s argument (the Mary acquires new knowledge about the world when she leaves the black and white room for the first time), and Lewis is arguing that Mary already had all the knowledge and what she learns is a new skill. … philosophers often baffle me, presumably because I’ve had no formal training at being one, so the shortcoming is mine.

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87

Yes. So one of my primary points, which I take from Gadamer, is just this. We “foretell” or “expect” in terms of what we have experienced. In this sense, the past is “in front of us” as the expected future.. We make sense of what is coming at us in terms of what has come at us before.

A scientific model can be understood as a compression of data (a history of measurements). The pre-diction (fore-telling) of the model is about the future, but this prediction is a function of the past — both in terms of the data used to choose the parameters of the model and in terms of the structure of the model ( linear rather than quadratic, etc.) The past “exists now” finally as this prediction/expectation.

88

I think you are politely criticizing my view because it is itself like a painting that you haven’t sufficiently deciphered.

The “space that needs filling in” is the “temporal depth” of the object. Each of us will meet the painting as an individuals self with an individual history. People not even born yet will find things in that painting that no human has yet found in the painting. So the painting has its “being” largely in the future. The painting is “in-progress.”

In ontocubism, the past is very important. The issue is how the past functions or exists. I suggest that the past exists as the “shape” of expectation. For instance, you meet this post right now with your entire past. Where is that past ? Can you point to it ? It is primarily “here” in the way the oncoming world shows up for you now.

89

Elsewhere I suggest that philosophy discloses false necessity as optional contingency. Some of the blind prejudice that constitutes us can be foregrounded. Our expectant comportment collides with the surprising object ( a dialogical partner perhaps.) I prefer emphasizing collision with the not-me object to a bracketing that encloses a sphere of immanence, etc.

To me these are two sides of the same coin, but I prefer to emphasize the primordial sociality of human existence. I agree with Bakhtin here:

We shall never reach the real, substantive roots of any given single utterance if we look for them within the confines of the single, individual organism, even when that utterance concerns what appears to be the most private and most intimate side of a person’s life. Any motivation of one’s behavior, any instance of self-awareness (for self-awareness is always verbal, always a matter of finding some specifically suitable verbal complex) is an act of gauging oneself against some social norm, social evaluation - is, so to speak, the socialization of oneself and one’s behavior. In becoming aware of myself, I attempt to look at myself, as it were, through the eyes of another person…

Each word, as we know, is a little arena for the clash and criss-crossing of differently oriented social accents. A word in the mouth of a particular individual person is a product of the living interaction of social forces. Thus, the psyche and ideology dialectically interpenetrate in the unitary and objective process of social intercourse … Utterance, as we know, is constructed between two socially organized per- sons, and in the absence of a real addressee, an addressee is presupposed in the person, so to speak, of a normal representative of the social group to which the speaker belongs. The word is oriented towards an addressee, toward who that addressee might be: a fellow-member or not of the same social group, of higher or lower standing (the addressee’s hierarchical status), someone connected with the speaker by close social ties (father, brother, husband, and so on) or not. There can be no such thing as an abstract addressee, a man unto himself, so to speak.

So we very much agree that “I am always other than myself.” In general, the identity of an object is an “ideal” collection or synthesis of differing moments. These “ideal identities” ( my reading of Plato’s “ideas”) help “articulate” the world, which is always world-for.

I also take time to be fundamental. Time is a name for being. Time is a name for consciousness.

90

I don’t object to anything you wrote in the post. I just want to clarify that “the forum” is a formal indication. I am trying to point at the vague belief that we enact when we offer our speech to others.

“Dialogical positivism” aspires toward a simple stupid honesty about how we live. I reject representational realism because it’s insincere, a theoretical toy.

We discuss the lifeworld or qualitative physical object. I’m talking about this cup of coffee in my hand that I can see and taste, saying that it’s damned good coffee. I talk to you across the table, presupposing that you are there with me in the situation. I expect you to understand me well enough.

But we move on to talking about difficult philosophy, and here the dialogue is more cautious and tentative. We paraphrase one another, to determine if the other hears us as we hear ourselves.

I’m not an optimist. I don’t assume a universal human rationality, but the forum is indeterminately open. Maybe the lady from Neptune will participate. Maybe Skynet will participate. Whether an organism participates will always be a situated judgment. Joe thinks Skynet is “conscious” and “understands,” while Jim refuses to understand Skynet this way. But Joe and Jim recognize one another as genuine participants.

91

Right. That’s basically it. But let me clarify an issue here. If I see my cat (optically this or that side of my cat), then I “live” the presence of the “transcendent” cat. I can thematize the fugitive perception as a moment or aspect of my cat, but I usually don’t. The perceptual object is “given” as a “unity of moments” that is “also for others.” I “automatically” take others in the room with me to have perceptual access to the couch, the lamp, etc.

So the fragments are “bound together” not by a “true physical object” but rather by the “idea” or “ideal identity” of the thing. In other words, experience is always already articulated as a system of enduring also-for-others objects. I speculate that Plato understands things this way in his “unwritten” theory of “unity and the indefinite.”

Saussure’s sound-image is an excellent specified example of this. I hear a particular speaking of the word “dog” as a saying of the transcendent object/word “dog.” The “transcendence” is “immediately given.” I tend to “hear right thru” the unrepeatable quality of the speaking to the “sound-image” and its context-driven significance.

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92

Intersubjective agreement is part of it, but “the forum” tries to point at something deeper. It’s something like the “blind faith” that we have in the “intelligibility” of our signs. If I try to ask the most radical question as the most radical skeptic, then I tragicomically take the significance of my signs ( the meaning of my question words ) for granted as I do so. I can question one piece of language only by “leaning” on the rest uncritically.

There is “hope” in all speech. My speech enacts a belief in others who may understand me. And I cannot be “rational” unless a me-transcending normativity is at least tacitly understood as genuine. To be “in language” is to be in a world with others, “virtual” if not also actual.

93

I like our attempt to “fuse horizons.”

For me “internal” and “external” don’t really apply here. For me, “from-a-point-of-view-ness” goes all the way down. In this sense subjectivity is absolute. On the other hand, I understand subjects as “empty.” The subject as “pure consciousness” is just the “raw being there as quality” of a face of the world that includes faces of objects.

As an individual believer, I can construct a directed graph that tries to capture the relevant gist of a situation. Other believers may construct different graphs. For me there is no “true” graph, but rational believers may try to harmonize their individual graphs.

Perceiver \longleftarrow Object

We would want to read the arrow in this case as a “moment” of the perceived object.

Perceiver1 \longleftarrow Object \longrightarrow Perceiver2

In this case, each arrow is a different moment of the same object.

I’ll stop here to check for feedback.

94

Oh, OK. I glanced at secondary sources and missed this ( but I didn’t spend much time on them.)

FWIW, I reject the very notion of “propositional truths.” I grant that we can and do co-construct systems of empirical objects ( signs ) that help us predict and control other empirical objects.

The “representational effect” of marks and noises is often taken too much for granted, in my view. What is a proposition ? The more sober approach answers that it is a blurry equivalence class of expressions. But many seem to less soberly assume a “meaning stuff” that the words “contain.”

95

“Ontocubism” includes a “quasi-hylomorphism” that I find — with obvious prejudice — in Plato’s unwritten doctrine.

Instead of “materiality” ( which is accidentally “idealistic”), I offer the term “quality” for the pre-stuff that is “beaten into shape” by “ideas.” This is pretty close to Feuerbach’s take on materialism. It’s also close to Kant’s collision of intuition and concept. But concepts in this case are not internal mindstuff things. Indeed, I avoid the use of “concept” because of its dualist associations.

As I see it, we find ourselves thrown into a world that we share with others. This world is full of objects. The spare tire in the trunk of my Honda is a “transcendent unity.” Its boundaries are vague. But I enact a trust in the marks and noises that point to this vaguely bounded entity in the shared world. The spare tire never shows itself the same way twice. Different people have different beliefs about it. But it is there in the world. In J. S. Mill’s terms, it’s an interpersonal possibility of experience that is also caught up in the causal-inferential nexus.

I “could” talk about the “atoms” that the tire is made of. But each of these atoms has its own “ideal identity.” Basically the world is “more than” what people call “thought.” Why do we not want to oppose “mind meaning” to “matter stuff” ? Because “matter stuff” is “too meaningful.” The matter of physics is “conceptual.” So physics matter is “too theoretical.”

I interpret Plato’s “chora” as the “qualitative continuum.” I already “betray” this continuum by naming it, by “projecting its ideal unity.” But I need this “bastard discourse” to point at the “quality” of the world. It’s a bit like the difference between the “concept” of feeling and “actual” feeling. Or the sign “pain” and an intense “case” of pain. There is pain in the world. Pain is pain. Pain is there. And the “heard sound” of a siren is “there.”

The world is “from a point of view” and “articulated” or “organized.” The “phenomenal field” is “quality” that is “taken as” a state of affairs involving between-us or transcendent objects. The “identity” of these objects is “ideal.” The objects are ongoing, and the boundaries of these objects can be extremely vague. To “deconstruct” an object in terms of other objects like atoms is brilliant for some purposes. But the “strongest” reading of “hyle” or “matter” is “quality” or “the indefinite.”

Of course this is just my current situated belief, which is offered up for criticism and discussion.

96

I wasn’t criticising your view as such, but trying to see it from different angles and also from my own point of view, which is likely bound to be different from yours or anyone else. I think paintings from Cubism are always unfinished and undeciphered state, and that is their point.

We the spectators need to fill in the gaps in the canvas with our own stories from our imagination, past memories or even thoughts.

I agree. Past is important in arts and philosophy. All arts are from the past. Even the films with future world themes must have been made in the past.

Future is unclear and unarrived to us. We can hope and plan for the future. But future is not in the realm of our perception yet always.

Remember Hegel said “The owl of Minerva takes flight after dusks.” Philosophy is a subject which reflects the past to the present. Future is to be lived through yet. It is not in our world of forms, hence not possible to recollect for our knowledge or deciphering.
I feel the cubism must think the same way, or based on the same principle.

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97

I didn’t mean to sound accusative, just to be clear ! I completely respect your approach. I don’t mind polite criticism anyway.

Basically what you say about cubist painting is how I see objects in general. They show themselves to each of us differently. They are “still arriving” and “always unfinished.” The object is never completely “deciphered.”

Yes. So my point is that our “filling in these gaps” is the continuing “arrival” of the object. If we use our memories to do this, then those memories become present again in a new context. The object “comes into focus” ( from the “future”) in terms of our past that therefore “leaps ahead of us” and “into” the oncoming object.

My claim is that — if you put away theory and just consider existence as a whole — you will find that experience is structured by care about the future. We are “steering” the oncoming future.

So I mostly agree that the future is not in the realm of perception. We sort of define the “present” in terms of what is perceptual. The perceptual is “here and now.” If my grandmother is there but not perceptually there, then I call her presence a “memory” or something I am “imagining.”

So the perceptual is the present. Hence the phrase “perceptually present.” But the moment is not punctiform. The “now” is not a real number on the line. Zeno’s arrow flies. And we can even read Zeno as trying to correct a popular delusion, that the “now” is instantaneous. James called it a “stream” of experience because it flows. Husserl discussed this also, in terms of retention and protention.

For instance, you can only read this sentence by remembering what has already been said while also anticipating what I’m trying to say as a whole. Likewise we can only appreciate music because what we just heard “lingers” and because we anticipate what is coming. Composers play on this memory and expectation, which we might call expectant remembering or remembering expectation.

Right. And this is a great moment in Hegel. How should we understand this ? Does the philosopher do anything at all here ? McCluhan made a similar point. The philosopher and artist are strange birds who actually live in the present. The non-philosopher and the non-artist have their flesh in the present, but conceptually they live in the past. Philosophy makes explicit the way the world has changed. To make the world explicit is to change the same world that is being made explicit. It’s a bit like wiping people’s glasses. Or giving them strong coffee. They finally notice that the world has changed.

I respect your skepticism. And I share it. This is the tragic point made by Gadamer. There is a gulf between the human and “the divine.” Experience teaches us that we cannot defeat the future. The future will surprise us and eventually devour us. I completely agree.

But philosophy basically is the mad fantasy that the future can be constrained. So it tries to sketch the “form” of all possible experience. For instance, Gadamer tells us that the future cannot be conquered, predicted, defeated. Yet this itself is a belief that is presented as worth remembering. But why remember it if it doesn’t help us face the future ?

Even the genuinely great Heidegger, the “official” thinker of the darkness of the future, had a theory of this dark future that he expected to remain relevant, valid, “true.” Same with Plato and Heraclitus. They enacted a faith that their personal insights would matter to those who were not yet born. Both wrote books — books are aimed at the future — but all we have left of Heraclitus are fragments.

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98

A comment on the “ideal.” For me this is not something mental or internal. Though it tends to get “internalized” by philosophers.

Another approach: bite the object like a false coin, but you will not taste its “identity.” You will not taste the “idea” that gives the thing its unity as a thing.

My Saussure thread died the usual natural death, but I think Saussure nailed this “ideality.”

[I]t is impossible for sound alone, a material element, to belong to language. It is only a secondary thing, substance to be put to use. A coin nominally worth five francs may contain less than half its worth of silver. Its value will vary according to the amount stamped upon it and according to its use inside or outside a political boundary. This is even more true of the linguistic signifier, which is not phonic but incorporeal —constituted not by its material substance but by the differences that separate its sound-image from all others.

His use of “incorporeal” here reads for me like the principle of unity in Plato’s unwritten doctrine. The word as repeatable is “not sonic” — not qualitative — in a peculiar sense. The word as relatively atemporal entity is the signifier is the acoustic image. We might say acoustic idea.

My cat just leapt up on the chair beside me. She is purring and not whining. The “my-cat-ness” is not given as colorshape or sound. But I am “whopped” with optic and auditory quality that is already articulated, already “that rascally cat again.” Her “ideal” “identity” is like a synthesis-in-progress.

I’m always on the hunt for better words. The phenomenon “is.” I find myself in a world of objects, not drowning in a mute qualitative continuum. I find myself enacting a “faith” in the “significance” of the marks and noises that I find myself having to take responsibility for.

The linguistic sign unites, not a thing and a name, but a concept and a sound-image. The latter is not the material sound, a purely physical thing, but the psychological imprint of the sound, the impression that it makes on our senses.

Putting it another way, language is a form and not a substance (see p. 113). This truth could not be overstressed, for all the mistakes in our terminology, all our incorrect ways of naming things that pertain to language, stem from the involuntary supposition that the linguistic phenomenon must have substance.

Likewise the world is “form and not a substance.” But we might risk understanding “quality” or the “sensory-affective” as a kind of ur-substance that “officially” cannot be named. As I said, something like Feuerbach’s understanding of “matter” as what “pure thought” excludes.

“Pure thought” is the “signified” — which I think we should reject, along with Plato, who tells us of the world as a collision of the “discrete and ideal” ( ideas ) and “the indefinite” or the qualitative continuum. But “collision” suggests an initial separation, which is misleading. Though perhaps this metaphor is necessary. Collision, fusion, entanglement. A quasi-hylomorphism. They are “entangled” like two legs on the same body, like two sides of the same coin.

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I can’t resist mentioning another primary use of this coin metaphor. Time shows by hiding. The presence of one moment of an object is the absence of all other moments of that same object.

For instance, the heads side of the coin is manifest only through the tails side being occluded. The “entire” coin can not be “compressed” into any particular now. The coin can only be present by also being absent. The coin has “temporal depth.”

Time itself is a coin with two sides, as this coin example shows. Time shows and conceals simultaneously. Showing is always hiding, because beings — as “ideal manifolds” — have temporal depth.

They also have “intersubjective depth” or “forum depth.” But we could maybe derive intersubjective depth from temporal depth, depending on our theory of personality. The “unity” of a “stream of experience” is also “ideal” or “enacted.”

99

That’s cool. Thanks for your clarification. I have been saying what I had in my mind on these topics just to see how others think on the topics, and how different they are. If everyone’s opinions are all same, then it wouldn’t be interesting. :slight_smile:

It is always interesting to hear different ideas on these topics suppose, and that is what dialogical aspect of philosophical and art topics are about.

Having gone through various discussions and even opposite arguments, if theories or concepts are robust, they will come out stronger and clearer which will be long lasting and much quoted and used for regenerating further new theories or concepts.

To me that point is the attraction of cubist arts. They always seem to reveal parts of the whole object, and from multiple points of view as well. It gives feeling of “becoming” and constantly “arriving” from the past to present. I suppose we could extend the feeling and inspiration into the future too. Although future is always blurred and not quite clear, and it can be abrupt and unexpected, it also has elements of hope and excitement in a way.

Cubist arts are interesting and inviting for keep revisiting because they are created with the calculated and reasoned imagination amalgamated with the objects in the world seen and thought from multiple angles.

I am wondering, if we could suss out also the temporal objects such as the past, present and future all at the same time from one painting such as “Girl with Mandolin”.

I could pick out some of my ideas to fill in the canvas of the painting from the past experience, feelings and thoughts to complete the painting into my own part of the temporal past. But if it were to tell us about future, how could we go about it. I wonder, if you could make up your own continuous narratives emerging from the painting on your futural predilection or thoughts. Can future be recollected, reasoned, regenerated or remembered?

Some say temporal factors are important in art, if it is to offer us continuous narratives from the work of art. One could look at the painting, and write a 10 volume novel or 1000 pages of poem based on it, or 4 hours of film could be made based on the image on the painting. For that, past, present and future must be available for the spectators or other artist who are deciphering the work.

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