I read him a number of years ago. So what do you think of my comments?
The original paper in this OP is by Wolfgang Fasching, who is a professor at University of Vienna. As noted, this is one a series of articles where Fasching brings the philosophy of Advaita to bear on the analytical philosophy of mind. In so doing, he mentions Husserl and Phenomenology, at least in the paper cited. That there are convergences between Husserl’s ‘epochē’ and aspects of Indian philosophy have been pointed out by many others apart from Fasching. But there’s nothing whatever in that paper about positivism, A J Ayer, Mach, or phenomenalism.
//sorry didn’t mean to sound so snarky. It’s only that I broke a ‘forum fast’ specifically because I spotted this thread (shouldn’t have been looking) and then felt that it got lost in the various digressions. I’m supposed to be working on something else altogether but self-control has never been a strong suit.//
This moves me, and it reminds me of Kojeve.
The Real itself is what organises itself and makes itself concrete so as to become a determinate “species,” capable of being revealed by a general notion"; the Real itself reveals itself through articulate knowledge and thereby becomes a known object that has the knowing subject as its necessary complement, so that "empirical existence” is divided into beings that speak and beings that are spoken of. For real Being existing as Nature is what produces Man who reveals that Nature (and himself) by speaking of it. Real Being thus transforms itself into “truth” or into reality revealed by speech, and becomes a “higher” and “higher” truth as its discursive revelation becomes ever more adequate and complete.
The concrete Real (of which we speak) is both Real revealed by a discourse, and Discourse revealing a real. And the Hegelian experience is related neither to the Real nor to Discourse taken separately, but to their indissoluble unity. And since it is itself a revealing Discourse, it is itself an aspect of the concrete Real which it describes.
Why is this an issue ? I only found Fasching in the first place because I got to the thesis of “consciousness is presence” through thinkers like Mach. While some are “allergic” to the “anti-spiritual” associations of “positivism,” others stuff their ears against anything “religious.”
I’m surprised that some are so eager to not see the virtue in various thinkers. What I don’t see much of is a critical analysis of actual passages in Mach, for instance. I see quotes of other thinkers, second hand reports.
I mean we can just drop the issue, because I wouldn’t try to convince someone that free jazz can be great. And this is like that. If someone is invested in not-liking something, so be it. Doesn’t offend me, but it contributes to a drifting from the issues into biased gossip. Instead of striving toward the best conception of consciousness, we praise and attack other theorist, forgetting the primary task.
In short, Fasching gives us his nondualism and Mach and Ayer theirs. If others don’t see it this way, that’s OK.
OK. That helps. This connects to operationalism. It also connects to an ideology that would like to excise the measuring witness altogether. “Because” witnesses are interchangable, the witness is not relevant at all. But this is nonsense. It’s the same bad reasoning that leads to the “immateriality” of “meaning” as the “content” of “qualitative empirical objects” that we call signs.
To me this nonsense goes undetected because we can afford to give a bad account of science — as long as we continue to act from the primacy of perception, especially our own.
Another influence on me for this thread was Schroedinger.
Consider any sense-perception; for example, that of a particular tree. Many philosophers have affirmed that one must distinguish the perception which a man has of the tree from the tree itself or the tree ‘in itself’ . The grounds offered for this at a naïve level are that the tree itself certainly does not enter the observer, but only certain effects proceeding from it. Perhaps we can justify this from a rather more advanced point of view, in that nowadays we can state with certainty that the tree is seen and perceived if and only if certain events, quite unknown to us in detail, occur in the observer’s central nervous system. However, this much we can say about these events: that if we knew them precisely we would not describe these events as a tree, not as the perception of a tree, nor as a perceived tree. Then is it correct to say that we perceive these events—which are the immediate substratum of our feeling and thinking? Surely not, or we would not find ourselves in such a deplorable state of hopeless ignorance about them. So what do we perceive, or where is this perception-of-a-tree which we are to distinguish from the tree itself?
E. Mach, R. Avenarius, W. Schuppe and others have, as we know, found a very simple and radical way out of this difficulty, which runs somewhat as follows. Kant having established that the ‘tree in itself’ is not only (as the English philosophers knew already) colourless, odourless, tasteless, and so on, but also belongs entirely to the realm of things-in-themselves which must in absolutely every respect remain inaccessible to our experience, we are in a position to declare once and for all that this thing-in-itself holds no interest for us whatever; that we are going, if necessary, to disregard it. Now, in the realm of things which do interest us, the tree presents itself just once, and we can just as well call this single datum a tree as a perception-of-a-tree—the first having the advantage of brevity. This one tree, then, is the one datum we have: it is at one and the same time the tree of physics and the tree of psychology. As we observed at an earlier point, the same elements go to make up both the Self and the external world, and in various complex forms are sometimes described as constituents of the external world—things—and sometimes as constituents of the Self—sensations, perceptions. These thinkers call this the restoration of the natural concept of the world, or the vindication of naive realism. It does away with a whole mass of pseudo-problems, in particular the famous ignorabimus of Du Bois Reymond, of how feeling and consciousness could arise from a movement of atoms.
Instead of responding to the points one by one, I will share some passages from Mach.
The apparent permanency of the ego consists chiefly in the single fact of its continuity, in the slowness of its changes. The many thoughts and plans of yesterday that are continued today, and of which our environment in waking hours incessantly reminds us (whence in dreams the ego can be very indistinct, doubled, or entirely wanting), and the little habits that are unconsciously and involuntarily kept up for long periods of time, constitute the groundwork of the ego. There can hardly be greater differences in the egos of different people, than occur in the course of years in one person. When I recall today my early youth, I should take the boy that I then was, with the exception of a few individual features, for a different person, were it not for the existence of the chain of memories. Many an article that I myself penned twenty years ago impresses me now as something quite foreign to myself. The very gradual character of the changes of the body also contributes to the stability of the ego, but in a much less degree than people imagine. Such things are much less analysed and noticed than the intellectual and the moral ego. Personally, people know themselves very poorly…
The ego is as little absolutely permanent as are bodies. That which we so much dread in death, the annihilation of our permanency, actually occurs in life in abundant measure. That which is most valued by us, remains preserved in countless copies, or, in cases of exceptional excellence, is even preserved of itself. In the best human being, however, there are individual traits, the loss of which neither he himself nor others need regret. Indeed, at times, death, viewed as a liberation from individuality, may even become a pleasant thought. Such reflections of course do not make physiological death any the easier to bear.
That protean pseudo-philosophical problem of the single thing with its many attributes, arises wholly from a misinterpretation of the fact, that summary comprehension and precise analysis, although both are provisionally justifiable and for many purposes profitable, cannot be carried on simultaneously. A body is one and unchangeable only so long as it is unnecessary to consider its details. Thus both the earth and a billiard-ball are spheres, if we are willing to neglect all deviations from the spherical form, and if greater precision is not necessary. But when we are obliged to carry on investigations in orography or microscopy, both bodies cease to be spheres.
A common and popular way of thinking and speaking is to contrast " appearance " with " reality." A pencil held in front of us in the air is seen by us as straight; dip it into the water, and we see it crooked. In the latter case we say that the pencil appears crooked, but is in reality straight. But what justifies us in declaring one fact rather than another to be the reality, and degrading the other to the level of appearance ? In both cases we have to do with facts which present us with different combinations of the elements, combinations which in the two cases are differently conditioned. Precisely because of its environment the pencil dipped in water is optically crooked; but it is tactually and metrically straight. An image in a concave or flat mirror is only visible, whereas under other and ordinary circumstances a tangible body as well corresponds to the visible image. A bright surface is brighter beside a dark surface than beside one brighter than itself. To be sure, our expectation is deceived when, not paying sufficient attention to the conditions, and substituting for one another different cases of the combination, we fall into the natural error of expecting what we are accustomed to, although the case may be an unusual one. The facts are not to blame for that. In these cases, to speak of " appearance " may have a practical meaning, but cannot have a scientific meaning. Similarly, the question which is often asked, whether the world is real or whether we merely dream it, is devoid of all scientific meaning. Even the wildest dream is a fact as much as any other. If our dreams were more regular, more connected, more stable, they would also have more practical importance for us. In our waking hours the relations of the elements to one another are immensely amplified in comparison with what they were in our dreams. We recognise the dream for what it is. When the process is reversed, the field of psychic vision is narrowed; the contrast is almost entirely lacking. Where there is no contrast, the distinction between dream and waking, between appearance and reality, is quite otiose and worthless.
The popular notion of an antithesis between appearance and reality has exercised a very powerful influence on scientific and philosophical thought. We see this, for example, in Plato’s pregnant and poetical fiction of the Cave, in which, with our backs turned towards the fire, we observe merely the shadows of what passes (Republic, vii. 1). But this conception was not thought out to its final consequences, with the result that it has had an unfortunate influence on our ideas about the universe. The universe, of which nevertheless we are a part, became completely separated from us, and was removed an infinite distance away. Similarly, many a young man, hearing for the first time of the refraction of stellar light, has thought that doubt was cast on the whole of astronomy, whereas nothing is required but an easily effected and unimportant correction to put everything right again.
Thus the great gulf between physical and psychological research persists only when we acquiesce in our habitual stereotyped conceptions. A colour is a physical object as soon as we consider its dependence, for instance, upon its luminous source, upon other colours, upon temperatures, upon spaces, and so forth. When we consider, however, its dependence upon the retina (the elements K L M. . .), it is a psychological object, a sensation. Not the subject matter, but the direction of our investigation, is different in the two domains. (Cp. also Chapter II., pp. 43, 44.)
That in this complex of elements, which fundamentally is only one, the boundaries of bodies and of the ego do not admit of being established in a manner definite and sufficient for all cases, has already been remarked. To bring together elements that are most intimately connected with pleasure and pain into one ideal mental-economical unity, the ego; this is a task of the highest importance for the intellect working in the service of the pain-avoiding, pleasure-seeking will. The delimitation of the ego, therefore, is instinctively effected, is rendered familiar, and possibly becomes fixed through heredity. Owing to their high practical importance, not only for the individual, but for the entire species, the composites " ego " and " body " instinctively make good their claims, and assert themselves with elementary force. In special cases, however, in which practical ends are not concerned, but where knowledge is an end in itself, the delimitation in question may prove to be insufficient, obstructive, and untenable.
Similarly, class-consciousness, class-prejudice, the feeling of nationality, and even the narrowest-minded local patriotism may have a high importance, for certain purposes. But such attitudes will not be shared by the broad-minded investigator, at least not in moments of research. All such egoistic views are adequate only for practical purposes. Of course, even the investigator may succumb to habit. Trifling pedantries and nonsensical discussions; the cunning appropriation of others’ thoughts, with perfidious silence as to the sources; when the word of recognition must be given, the difficulty of swallowing one’s defeat, and the too common eagerness at the same time to set the opponent’s achievement in a false light: all this abundantly shows that the scientist and scholar have also the battle of existence to fight, that the ways even of science still lead to the mouth, and that the pure impulse towards knowledge is still an ideal in our present social conditions.
I once heard the question seriously discussed, "How the perception of a large tree could find room in the little head of a man?)’ Now, although this "problem " is no problem, yet it renders us vividly sensible of the absurdity that can be committed by thinking sensations spatially into the brain. When I speak of the sensations of another person, those sensations are, of course, not exhibited in my optical or physical space; they are mentally added, and I conceive them causally, not spatially, attached to the brain observed, or rather, functionally presented. When I speak of my own sensations, these sensations do not exist spatially in my head, but rather my “head” shares with them the same spatial field, as was explained above. (Compare the remarks on Fig. I on pp. I7-I9 above.).
The unity of consciousness is not an argument in point. Since the apparent antithesis between the real world and the world given through the senses lies entirely in our mode of view, and no actual gulf exists between them, a complicated and variously interconnected content of consciousness is no more difficult to understand than is the complicated interconnection of the world.
If we regard the ego as a real unity, we become involved in the following dilemma: either we must set over against the ego a world of unknowable entities (which would be quite idle and purposeless), or we must regard the whole world, the egos of other people included, as comprised in our own ego (a proposition to which it is difficult to yield serious assent).
“I left the room… I was told that the group had agreed on a word… I began to ask questions… ‘Is it a living thing?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Is it an animal?’ ‘Yes.’ … ‘Is it a cat?’ ‘No.’ … Finally, I was forced to guess ‘a dog.’ The group cheered. ‘You got it!’ they said… But I asked, ‘What word did you have in mind?’ They said, ‘We didn’t have a word in mind. We just answered your questions so as to be consistent with all the previous answers.’” [Source: Wheeler, At Home in the Universe , p. 248]
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That is a great passage ! This one blends that one and the Kojeve passage ( from the Blouin essay linked to above) :
the world does not transcend experience in the sense that it exists independently from it, affecting it from the “outside,” but in the sense that it constitutes the regulative idea of its own process of self-transcendence. The world is not what experience takes place in, but what experience strives towards. It is the“infinite idea” of the self-organizing flow of experience… the world “in itself” turns out to be for Husserl an Idea in the Kantian sense (see Ideas I, §143), that guides consciousness as it strives to integrate “the openly endless multiplicity of changing experiences” (Husserl 1970, 164 [167]) into a coherent unity. Far from being an autonomous reality conditioning experience from the outside, the world is for Husserl the infinite telos of experience itself.
This would describe what “aspects” of the world have in common. By “aspect of the world,” I mean “stream of experience” or “phenomenal stream.” If signs are “qualitative,” we don’t have to think of a two-layer aspect of “mind-meaning stuff” and “matter-meaningless stuff.” The full, tangled richness of the lifeworld is intended. The dialectical, self-referential, enacted “sign-distinctions” are themselves a crucial part of this aspect’s journey toward coherence. This conversation manifests the tendency of such aspects to “find themselves in others and others in themselves.”
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I happen to love Popper for his honest style, if I don’t always find him convincing. I recall being impressed by his generosity toward Berkeley in C&R — and by Berkeley, who comes off as surprisingly sophisticated, despite his theological “surplus.”
THE PURPOSE of this note is to give a list of those ideas of Berkeley’s in the field of the philosophy of physics which have a strikingly new look. They are mainly ideas which were rediscovered and reintroduced into the discussion of modern physics by Ernst Mach and Heinrich Hertz, and by a number of philosophers and physicists, some of them influenced by Mach, such as Bertrand Russell, Philip Frank, Richard von Mises, Moritz Schlick, 1 Werner Heisenberg and others. I may say at once that I do not agree with most of these positivistic views. I admire Berkeley without agreeing with him. …
The following twenty-one theses are not always expressed in Berkeley’s terminology; their order is not connected with the order in which they appear in Berkeley’s writings, or in which they might be presented in a systematic treatment of Berkeley’s thought. For a motto, I open my list with a quotation from Berkeley ( DM, 29). 1. ‘To utter a word and mean nothing by it is unworthy of a philosopher.’ 2. The meaning of a word is the idea or the sense-quality with which it is associated (as its name). Thus the words ‘absolute space’ and ‘absolute time’ are without any empirical (or operational) meaning; Newton’s doctrine of absolute space and absolute time must therefore be rejected as a physical theory. (Cf. Pr, 97, 99, 116; DM, 53, 55, 62; An, 50, Qu. 8; S, 271: ‘Concerning absolute space, that phantom of the mechanical and geometrical philosophers, it may suffice to observe that it is neither perceived by our sense, nor proved by our reason . . .’; DM, 64: ‘for . . . the purpose of the philosophers of mechanics . . . it suffices to replace their “absolute space” by a relative space determined by the heavens of the fixed stars. . . . Motion and rest defined by this relative space can be conveniently used instead of the absolutes. . . .’) 3. The same holds for the word ‘absolute motion’. The principle that all motion is relative can be established by appealing to the meaning of ‘motion’, or else to operationalist arguments. (Cf. Pr as above, 58, 115: ‘To denominate a body “moved” it is requisite . . . that it changes its distance or situation with regard to some other body . . .’; DM, 63: ‘No motion can be discerned or measured, except with the help of sensible things’; DM, 62: ‘. . . the motion of a stone in a sling or of water in a whirled bucket cannot be called truly circular motion . . . by those who define [motion] with the help of absolute space. . . .’) 4. The words ‘gravity’ and ‘force’ are misused in physics; to introduce force as the cause or ‘principle’ of motion (or of an acceleration) is to introduce ‘an occult quality’ ( DM, 1-4, and especially 5, 10, 11, 17, 22, 28; Alc, vii, 9). More precisely, we should say ‘an occult metaphysical substance’; for the term ‘occult quality’ is a misnomer, in so far as ‘quality’ should more properly be reserved for observable or observed qualities–qualities which are given to our senses, and which, of course, are never ‘occult’. ( An, 50, Qu. 9; and especially DM, 6: ‘It is plain, then, that it is useless to assume that the principle of motion is gravity or force; for how could this principle be known any more clearly through what has been called an occult quality? That which is itself occult explains nothing. Not to mention that an unknown acting cause should more properly be called a [metaphysical] substance rather than a quality.’) 5. In view of these considerations Newton’s theory cannot be accepted as an explanation which is truly causal, i.e. based on true natural causes . The view -167- that gravity causally explains the motion of bodies (that of the planets, of free-falling bodies, etc.), or that Newton discovered that gravity or attraction is ‘an essential quality’ ( Pr, 106), whose inherence in the essence or nature of bodies explains the laws of their motion, must be discarded ( S, 234; see also S, 246, last sentence). But it must be admitted that Newton’s theory leads to the correct results ( DM, 39, 41). To understand this, ‘it is of the greatest importance . . . to distinguish between mathematical hypotheses and the natures [ or essences ] of things 4. . . If we observe this distinction, then all the famous theorems of mechanical philosophy which . . . make it possible to subject the world system [i.e. the solar system] to human calculations, may be preserved; and at the same time, the study of motion will be freed of a thousand pointless trivialities and subtleties, and from [meaningless] abstract ideas’ ( DM, 66). 6. In physics (mechanical philosophy) there is no causal explanation (cf. S, 231), i.e. no explanation based upon the discovery of the hidden nature or essence of things ( Pr, 25). ‘. . . real efficient causes of the motion . . . of bodies do not in any way belong to the field of mechanics or of experimental science. Nor can they throw any light on these . . .’ ( DM, 41). 7. The reason is, simply, that physical things have no secret or hidden, ‘true or real nature’, no ‘real essence’, no ‘internal qualities’ ( Pr, 101). 8. There is nothing physical behind the physical bodies, no occult physical reality. Everything is surface, as it were; physical bodies are nothing but their qualities. Their appearance is their reality ( Pr, 87, 88). 9. The province of the scientist (of the ‘mechanical philosopher’) is the discovery, ‘by experiment and reasoning’ ( S, 234), of Laws of Nature, that is to say, of the regularities and uniformities of natural phenomena. 10. The Laws of Nature are, in fact, regularities or similarities or analogies ( Pr, 105) in the perceived motions of physical bodies ( S, 234) ‘. . . these we learn from experience’ ( Pr, 30); they are observed, or inferred from observations ( Pr, 30, 62; S, 228, 264). 11. ‘Once the Laws of Nature have been formed, it becomes the task of the philosopher to show of each phenomenon that it is in conformity with these laws, that is, necessarily follows from these principles.’ ( DM, 37; cf. Pr, 107; and S, 231: ‘their [i.e. the "mechanical philosophers’"] province being . . . to account for particular phenomena by reducing them under, and showing their conformity to, such general rules.') 12. This process may be called, if we like, ‘explanation’ (even ‘causal explanation’), so long as we distinguish it clearly from the truly causal (i.e. metaphysical) explanation based upon the true nature or essence of things.
…
Berkeley and Mach are both convinced that there is no physical world (of primary qualities, or of atoms; cf. Pr, 50; S, 232, 235) behind the world of physical appearances ( Pr, 87, 88). Both believed in a form of the doctrine nowadays called phenomenalism–the view that physical things are bundles, or complexes, or constructs of phenomenal qualities, of particular experienced colours, noises, etc.; Mach calls them ‘complexes of elements’. The difference is that for Berkeley, these are directly caused by God. For Mach, they are just there. While Berkeley says that there can be nothing physical behind the physical phenomena, Mach suggests that there is nothing at all behind them.
If “physical phenomena” are understood as qualitative phenomena, then Mach strangely echoes a plausible reading of Plato’s unwritten doctrine.
Plato is said to have described the Indefinite Dyad as ‘the Great and the Small’ (Gk., to méga kai to mikrón).[26] This is the principle or source of more and less, of excess and deficiency, of ambiguity and indefiniteness, and of multiplicity. It does not imply unlimitedness in the sense of a spatial or quantitative infinity; instead, the indefiniteness consists in a lack of determinateness and therefore of fixed form. The Dyad is called ‘indefinite’ to distinguish it from definite two-ness, i.e., the number two, and to indicate that the Dyad stands above mathematics.[27]
The One and the Indefinite Dyad are the ultimate ground of everything because the realm of Plato’s Forms and the totality of reality derive from their interaction. The whole manifold of sensory phenomena rests in the end on only two factors. Form issues from the One, which is the productive factor; the formless Indefinite Dyad serves as the substrate for the activity of the One. Without such a substrate, the One could produce nothing. All Being rests upon the action of the One upon the Indefinite Dyad. This action sets limits to the formless, gives it Form and particularity, and is therefore also the principle of individuation that brings separate entities into existence. A mixture of both principles underlies all Being.
The dyad can be read as the “qualitative continuum,” the “presence” or “quality” of events. “Thinghood” is “enacted within quality.” A number is not “other than” qualitative numerals. The numeral is a numeral because it belongs to a pragmatic equivalence class. We ignore differences to enact the temporal interpersonal unity of a plurality of singular non-repeatable events as a thing, as a person, as a number. So “meaning” is performed, “in” or “as” quality, and need not be understood as something radically other. Note that “pure quality” is also nonsense from this POV. Nothing is “meaningless.”
This gives us a view on the claim that empirical things are “between being and non-being.” In this context, I take “being” to be “the one” and “nonbeing” to be the dyad or qualitative continuum.
I mention this to clarify that we need not read Mach’s insistence on “nothing at all behind them” in terms of a world lacking “significance.”
I find the paper an unusually tough read. I will read it again. However, could you elaborate a bit (a sentence or two) on the notion of “presence-for-me” within “the context of the ontological difference”? I suspect that would make a second reading ever more useful.
Thank you.
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The first thought that came to mind for me was:
Consciousness is the being-in-the-world-for-me of whatever I am conscious of.
Being/consciousness is not an entity but the “being-there” or “presence” of entities. So the ontological difference is applied, because the “presence” of the world is not something that is itself present. The world as “present in its quality” is world-from-POV. But it’s the world itself, not “internal experience” that has to be “explained in its emergence.”
What is implied here, IMV, is an ontological perspectivism. It’s not monism, with “consciousness” as a “fundamental stuff.” It’s a radical pluralism. The presence of kinds of things is not itself a kind of thing.
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That phrase in my view is fine, but how does it signify for you ? How are those words “significantly present” “for you” ?
I can only trade signs with you, but I would feel that you “see what I see” ( which may not be valid for others) if you see that any reification “loses it.” Presence is quality is the “there-ness as such” of whatever happens to be there.
“World-from-POV” has a “subject-like feel.” For me what Fasching says involves the “realization” that it is “all real” in some generous sense that goes beyond the pragmatic reality-appearance distinction. The “daydream” we call “yours” is another thing in the world. It is present, implicitly “for you.” It is “yours” because of the way that it is present. I can discuss your daydream, but it’s “yours” because of the “how” of its “quality.”
I can see how all this would sound flaky. But I got here, to this position on consciousness — afterward found Fasching and others — especially via the “scientistic” Mach.
“Being-in-the-world” strikes me as spiritual. Thanks for asking.
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I’m with you. I mean that “Being-in-the-world” leaves nothing out.
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I found a paper that might be helpful for making sense of Fasching. source
IMV, this is about as slippery as it gets. The language is trying to point. So “presence” is one pointer and “quality” is another. The world is present as quality. Or quality is present. This “being there qualitatively” is what, I think, is intended by “phenomenal consciousness.”
So why the word “presence” ? I think it refers to here and now. But what is here and now is what is ( often tacitly) in front of me as a body in the world.
What philosophical account of these different qualities of experience and/or reality can be given? To raise the problem of the quality means to raise the general and original problem of the relation between appearance and reality, which is a classic and fundamental issue of philosophy since ever. In particular, since the very beginning of the philosophical enterprise, the reflection on the relation between subjective experience and its objects gives rise to difficult problems. Starting from the analysis of ordinary perception, the inquiry into its nature draws immediately the attention to phenomena such as the (intrapersonal) perceptual relativity: I believe that the lemon in front of me is yellow, that it has an oval shape, etc. but simply moving around it and prosecuting the perceptual experience I realize that its perceptual appearance (its color, shape, smell, etc.) continuously changes in relation to different sources of variation (the ambient light, my position in space, the state of adaptation of my senses - such as the adaptation to the light of my eyes - etc.)3 . Furthermore, the reflection on perceptual experience soon leads to highlight the possibility of phenomena such as illusions and hallucinations. All these phenomena constitute the so-called “problem of perception” (see Crane, 2011), which leads to question the relation between appearance and a supposed mind-independent reality, giving rise to the crucial issue of scepticism, which in turn lays at the heart of the general “problem of knowledge”.
To me it looks like “perspectivity” has tended to be grasped in terms of experience as internal stuff, which is “caused” by a-perspectival “actual” stuff.
In front of this problem, a classic option, which can be traced back to the ancient atomism, consists on distinguishing between two different kinds of properties of the appearing objects of perception: qualitative properties such as colors, smells, sounds, etc. - conceived as merely subjective appearances, internal to the mind of the experiencing subject – and quantitative, physical-mathematical properties (spatial extension, mass, shape, location, number, etc.) – conceived as objective properties of mind-independent objects. This classic view, then, constitutes a kind of internalism about qualities (or qualia internalism), which conceives the sensible qualities of the objects of experience as subjective sensations, whose appearance within the subject’s mind is caused by events in the material-physical realm (conceived as a-qualitative).
What follows from Fasching —as in the vision of the world implied by consciousness understood as being/presence — is something like this:
the environment that is perceived by a living organism is not a pre-given external domain, but arises together with the perceiver in the perceptual relation. Indeed, in the enactive view perceiver and environment are not pregiven, substantial domains that somehow enter in relation in perception, but they are processes that dependently co-arise. The central thesis of the enactive approach, exactly, is that «knower and known, mind and world, stand in relation to each other through mutual specification or dependent coorigination» (Varela et al., 1991, p. 150). The crucial concept, then, is that of dependent co-arising, which translates the notion of pratityasamutpada: a central concept of Buddhist thought and especially of the Madhyamaka philosophy. The reference to this tradition is not marginal in The Embodied Mind, constituting the framework within which the enactivists develop their entire proposal. In particular, the enactive view is elaborated as a general philosophical framework for rethinking the relation between subject and object, by deconstructing the concept of them as substantial, pre-given and independent realities, and substituting the concept of a neat duality of subject-object with the strong relationist and processual view that is expressed by the notion of dependent co-arising. Indeed, the enactivists take back from Nagarjuna, the founder of the Madhyamaka, a deconstructive dialectic whose aim consists on showing the emptiness of substantial reality (sunyata) of both subject and object, mind and world.
What is left undiscussed here is our sharing of the world. I am your environment and you are in mine.
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Reading another Fasching paper. He argues that there’s just one “I.” Wild stuff, but to me it makes sense that the unity of a “stream” of consciousness is not “absolute.” My “now” or the-now-for-me may be mingled with what feels like the-yesterday-for-me. So “time” is “in the moment,” in some sense, in the “how” of its “presencing.”
Yet is this not an obvious absurdity? Is it not obvious that I am not the other, that I am not experiencing her or his experiences? – Actually, I do not find this so obvious. A kind of self- pluralization of the I lies at the very heart of subjectivity: At each moment of the stream of consciousness the continuous becoming-past of my own experiencing occurs, and with this my own I qua the I of this past experiencing becomes there for me as existing outside myself (cf. Husserl 1973, 344 f.; 1970, 185) – but still, the I “over there” (back then) is strictly the same I, is me. I.e., time is the permanent process of “self-othering” of subjectivity, the continuous paradoxical happening of the I’s becoming an other for itself while still remaining one and the same.
So my own experiential past is just as little immediately experienced in my present experiencing as any other’s experience. And in this sense, it might very well be that in the other it is I myself who looks at me like from an unrememberable past so that to encounter an other would be analogous to my being, as an amnesiac, confronted with the remnants of my own forgotten past, externally indicating to me the inner life of an I, which is strange to me – none of which implies that this I, which I encounter from the outside, is anyone other than myself.
So I wouldn’t read this as an empirical case for an empirical claim. It’s instead a tentative explication of what it means for us to share the same world from “different” points of view.
At the very least, I think it helps point at our desire to “share in meaning.” The desire to understand and to be understood is the desire to see from the same ( high ) vantage point.
Have you previously encountered any of the popular Advaita Vedanta books? The most famous example is the figure of Ramana Maharishi (died 1950) who’s ashram in Southern India has been a place of pilgramage for generations. Somerset Maugham visited and afterwards wrote The Razor’s Edge (made into a pretty dreadful movie starring Bill Murray, but still. Apparently there was also a 1946 version but I haven’t seen it.)
I won’t try and present or summarise ‘the teaching of Ramana Maharishi’ however suffice to say his books, some of the later titles edited and published by Paul Brunton, which have been hugely influential in popular culture since the 1960’s.
An earlier examplar was Swami Vivekananda, who lectured at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago sometime around 1893 and who then travelled the US by train lecturing to packed houses across the US. The Vedanta Society, which he started, is still active, with a branch in New York currently lead by Swami Sarvapriyananda who has a lot of talks on YouTube.
So the whole basis of Advaita Vedanta is that ‘thou art That’, ‘that’ being Brahman, each individual being ātman (which simply means ‘the Self’ or ‘I AM’.)
Fasching has a lot of essays where he applies Vedanta’s types of arguments to philosophy of mind. I’ve only read the first of the one you presented, but he seems a congenial figure to my way of thinking.
Also note that Analytic Idealist Bernardo Kastrup likewise presents a Vedanta-influenced idealist philosophy and has several online dialogues with the above-mentioned Swami Sarvapriyananda. Kastrup is known for his theory of ‘dissociated alters’, that is, individuals are all fundamentally ‘mind-at-large’ (his term). Individual minds are dissociative processes within mind-at-large. He has about 25,000 hours of lectures online should you be interested in following up.
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No. I do have The Upanishads and The Bhagavad Gita.
Yes. I mean I agree with what those signs say to me. I find the same insight in quite a few thinkers now, variously expressed. What I mean by “nondualism” — how I understand “thou art That” — remains “conceptual,” though of course it’s a matter of feeling too.
I think he’s pretty great. I’ve shared his work with people interested in consciousness, but most of them didn’t find anything in it. To me the issue is the inherited-automatic reification of consciousness as some kind of stuff. Of course there’s what Husserl pointed out: a naive fetishizing of the scientific image that doesn’t consider its rootedness in the lifeworld. If you are theoretically-blind to the lifeworld, you don’t see “the forum” as presupposed, don’t even feel the problem of meaning, and so on.
I’ve looked into Kastrup, read some of his papers, seen some of his videos, and I especially liked his “altars.” But I object to the term “idealism,” basically because it suggests “mind” as a “stuff.” But I don’t object to any term in all contexts. A sign is chosen for the moment.
It’s not that there’s anything shameful about idealism. I’m sure the “ontological perspectivism” that I’ve put forth recently sounds like idealism to many, so I’m not afraid of an unpopular view. It’s just that my understanding of “thou art That” implies a radical pluralism. There is no special kind of stuff. If “being” or “consciousness” or “presence” is “what it needs to be” to get the job done, it can’t be just another stuff.
I understand that “mind” suggests the way the world is given as if the “experience” of an empirical subject, but I think that “mind” suggests a “stuff” and obscures the ontological difference, so that consciousness/being is reified. So the pointing fails.
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In the OP, I suggested ( as an interpretation of Fasching) that we understand “consciousness” as a synonym of “being.” For me the ontological difference, which is crucial here, is the difference between beings themselves and their “being” or “presence.”
I yank this out of context as suggestive.
Every person in history knows Being immediately, though without acknowledging it as such. But as undeniable as is the immediacy of this knowledge of Being, that is also how rarely the thinking of Being succeeds or even commences. lt is not that this thinking is difficult and would require special arrangements in order to be carried out. If we may speak of a difficulty here, it consists in the fact that to think Being is very simple, but that the simple is for us the most arduous. To think Being does not require a solemn approach and the pretension of arcane erudition, nor the display of rare and exceptional states as in mystical raptures, reveries, and swoonings. All that is needed is simple wakefulness in the proximity of any random unobtrusive being, an awakening that all of a sudden sees that the being “is.”
The awakening for this “it is;” of a being, and above all the remaining awake for the “it is,” and the watching over the clearing of beings-that constitutes the essence of essential thinking.
To think Being requires in each instance a leap, a leap into the groundless from the habitual ground upon which for us beings always rest. It is as the groundless that the free comes to light. and that is how we name it. provided we think nothing more of a being than its “it is.”
This genuine thinking occurs “by leaps,” for it ignores the bridges and railings and ladders of explanation, which always only derives beings from beings, since it remains on the “soil” of “facts.” This ground is full of cracks. It never bears. For every being to which we adhere to the exclusion of all else bears only as a consequence of an oblivion of Being, wherein nevertheless the being is present. Being, however, is not a ground but is the groundless. It is called such because it is primordially detached from a “soil” and “ground” and does not require them.
Being, the “it is” of a being, is never autochthonous in beings, as if Being could be extracted from beings and then stood upon them as on its ground. It is only beings in relation to beings that are autochthonous. Being, the never autochthonous, is the groundless. This seems to be a lack, though only if calculated in terms of beings, and it appears as an abyss in which we founder without support in our relentless pursuit of beings. In fact we surely fall into the abyss, we find no ground, as long as we know and seek a ground only in the form of a being and hence never carry out the leap into Being or leave the familiar landscape of the oblivion of Being.
This leap requires no digressions or formalities. For everywhere and always and in the closest proximity to the most inconspicuos beings there already dwells the openness of the possibility of explicitly thinking the “it is” of beings as the free, in the clearing of which beings appear as unconcealed. The open, to which every being is liberated as if to its freedom, is Being itself. Everything unconcealed is as such secured in the open of Being, i.e., in the groundless.
Is this mysticism ? I don’t know. Something radically simple is pointed at. Something almost “empty.” Something that one can’t “know things” about. Yet any sign can be traded in the style of a mystification. So for me it’s not about Fasching or Heidegger or whoever but about this strange “empty” gesture. This pointing that many find pointless.