Experience defines existence?

Metaphysics & Epistemology
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I’m glad I did, as now we can bring in stuff like the Gospel of Thomas and heretical interpretations of Christ. Yes, indeed, a couple of atheists discussing Christ.

Yes. And really I just meant that what I’ve picked up of Buddha’s ontology or metaphysics is positivistic in the sense of phenomenalistic. Not many people look into early positivists and appreciate their “resolution” of the mind-matter issue. For many, the word refers inappropriately to today’s boring flavors of naive scientism.

The arrow metaphor reminds me strongly of the later Wittgenstein, at least in those moments where he seems tormented by philosophy or at least eager to play doctor for those who are tormented. For me philosophy has always been a pleasure, so I could never relate to the therapeutic framing of OLP or analytic philosophy in its “soporific” mode.

I think that was ( as I vaguely remember) Spengler’s view also. He even called Buddha a “nihilist” — in his post-cultural sense of the word. I note that he also included Socrates as such a nihilist.

Me too. This is an issue that has been close to me for many years. Feuerbach puts Christian mystical insight in “rational” form.

It is by means of Empfindung or sense experience that sentient beings are able to distinguish individuals from one another, including, in some instances, individuals that share the same essence. The form of experience is temporality, which is to say that whatever is directly experienced occurs “now”, or at the moment in time to which we refer as “the present”. Experience, in other words, is essentially transitory, and its contents are incommunicable. What we experience are the perceivable features of individual objects. It is through the act of thinking that we are able to identify those features through the possession of which different individuals belong to the same species, with the other members of which they share these essential features in common.

Unlike sense experience, thought is essentially communicable. Thinking is not an activity performed by the individual person qua individual. It is the activity of spirit, to which Hegel famously referred in the Phenomenology as “‘I’ that is ‘We’ and ‘We’ that is ‘I’” (Hegel [1807] 1977: 110). Pure spirit is nothing but this thinking activity, in which the individual thinker participates without himself (or herself) being the principal thinking agent. That thoughts present themselves to the consciousness of individual thinking subjects in temporal succession is due not to the nature of thought itself, but to the nature of individuality, and to the fact that individual thinking subjects, while able to participate in the life of spirit, do not cease in doing so to exist as corporeally distinct entities who remain part of nature, and are thus not pure spirit.

The linked article is great, but I wish I had a pdf version of his first book, Thoughts on Death and Immortality. This is a reading ( by me ) of one the great passages.

Ah yes, I have looked at it. Great stuff. And, weirdly, Engels wrote an amazing piece on early Christianity, claiming that Revelation was the earliest book in the N.T. I don’t know whether I believe him, but his take is fascinating.

There can be no doubt that this book, with its date so originally authenticated as the year 68 or 69, is the oldest of all Christian literature. No other is written in such barbaric language, so full of Hebraisms, impossible constructions and mistakes in grammar. Chapter I, verse 4, for example, says literally:

“Grace be unto you … from he that is being and that was and that is coming.”

Only professional theologians and other historians who have a stake in it now deny that the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles are but later adaptations of writings which are now lost and whose feeble historical core is now unrecognizable in the maze of legend…

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Any resemblance is superficial. Buddhism (and Vedanta) are religious philosophies. Their aim is ‘liberation from the round of rebirth’. Of course you’re perfectly at liberty to privilege secular to religious philosophies, but saying that ‘the Buddha was positivist’ is too big an interpretive leap.

The dictionary definition of positivism is a ‘philosophical approach asserting that the only valid knowledge is scientific knowledge, which must be derived from observable, measurable, and objective facts. It rejects intuition, metaphysics, and religious faith, focusing strictly on verifiable sensory data and logical analysis.’ Neither Vedanta nor Buddhism would stand up under that definition.

B ut, you know, never let the facts get in the way of a good story.

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@Wayfarer

Thought both of you might find these fragments from Spengler fascinating. Not endorsing them but presenting them as more context.

In the Late-Classical, we find the event taking place inside Hellenistic-Roman Stoicism, that is, the long death-struggle of the Apollinian soul. In the interval from Socrates — who was the spiritual father of the Stoa and in whom the first signs of inward impoverishment and city-intellectualism became visible — to Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, every existence-ideal of the old Classical underwent transvaluation. In the case of India, the transvaluation of Brahman life was complete by the time of King Asoka (150 b.c), as we can see by comparing the parts of the Vedanta put into writing before and after Buddha. And ourselves? Even now the ethical socialism of the Faustian soul, its fundamental ethic, as we have seen, is being worked upon by the process of transvaluation as that soul is walled up in the stone of the great cities. Rousseau is the ancestor of this socialism; he stands, like Socrates and Buddha, as the representative spokesman of a great Civilisation.
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Rousseau’s rejection of all great Culture-forms and all significant conventions, his famous “Return to the state of Nature,” his practical rationalism, are unmistakable evidences. Each of the three buried a millennium of spiritual depth. Each proclaimed his gospel to mankind, but it was to the mankind of the city intelligentsia, which was tired of the town and the Late Culture, and whose “pure” (i.e., soulless) reason longed to be free from them and their authoritative form and their hardness, from the symbolism with which it was no longer in living communion and which therefore it detested. The Culture was annihilated by discussion. If we pass in review the great 19th-century names with which we associate the march of this great drama— Schopenhauer, Hebbel, Wagner, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Strindberg—we comprehend in a glance that which Nietzsche, in a fragmentary preface to his incomplete master-work, deliberately and correctly called the Coming of Nihilism. Every one of the great Cultures knows it, for it is of deep necessity inherent in the finale of these mighty organisms. Socrates was a nihilist, and Buddha.

What ever we may take Morale to be, it is no part of Morale to provide its own analysis; and we shall get to grips with the problem, not by considering what should be our acts and aims and standards, but only by diagnosing the Western feeling in the very form of the enunciation.
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In this matter of morale, Western mankind, without exception, is under the influence of an immense optical illusion. Everyone demands something of the rest. We say “thou shalt” in the conviction that so-and-so in fact will, can and must be changed or fashioned or arranged conformably to the order, and our belief both in the efficacy of, and in our title to give, such orders is un- shakable. That, and nothing short of it, is, for us, morale.
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In the ethics of the West everything is direction, claim to power, will to affect the distant. Here Luther is completely at one with Nietzsche, Popes with Darwinians, Socialists withJesuits; for one and all, the beginning of morale is a claim to general and permanent validity. It is a necessity of the Faustian soul that this should be so. He who thinks or teaches “otherwise” is sinful, a backslider, a foe, and he is fought down without mercy. You "shall, the State “shall,” society “shall”—this form of morale is to us self-evident; it represents the only real meaning that we can attach to the word. But it was not so either in the Classical, or in India, or in China. Buddha, for instance, gives a pattern to take or to leave, and Epicurus offers counsel. Both undeniably are forms of high morale, and neither contains the will-element.

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My understanding is that James recruited the term “pure experience” as a direct translation of Richard Avenarius’s term reine Erfahrung. James found common ground between his own views and Avenarius’s positivism, specifically with Avenarius’s rejection of what he called ‘introjection’ and the dualism that follows from it. But James forged his own idea of pure experience and later regretted using the term because of its substantive connotations as a noun (he would have preferred a more verb-like connotation such as ‘experiencing’).

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Right. I only mentioned it because James’ ‘radical empiricism’ is nothing like the way the term was used by Mach and other empiricist philosophers generally. It is much nearer to phenomenology in intent, although James’ didn’t use that term and his work pre-dated Husserl’s.

It is perfectly true that the Buddha’s last words were to ‘seek your own salvation with diligence’ and that wisdom is something that has to be known first person. But it’s also true that the Buddhist Sangha has been an essential element of Buddhism from the outset - one of the ‘three jewels’. The social element of Buddhism is fundamental.

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Of course Buddha is not literally a positivist. I recently read Buddhist Logic, and certainly the philosophical side of Buddhism is similar to positivism and phenomenalism. Not a very strong claim really, as you yourself have quoted “anti-metaphysical” moments in Buddhists texts.

To pluck just a couple of many such examples:

The momentary character of everything existing is further established by arguments from perception and inference. The first of them is an argument from direct perception. That sensation is a momentary flash is proved by introspection. But a momentary sensation is but the reflex of a momentary thing. It cannot seize neither what precedes nor what follows. Just as when we perceive a patch of blue colour in a momentary sensation, we perceive just the thing which corresponds to that sensation, i. e., the blue and not the yellow, even so do we perceive in that sensation just the present moment, not the preceding one, and not the following one. When the existence of a patch of blue is perceived, its non-existence. or absence, is eo ipso excluded and hence its existence in the former and in the following moments is also excluded. The present moment alone is seized by sensation. Since all external objects are reducible to sense-data, and the corresponding sensations are always confined to a single moment, it becomes clear that all objects, as far as they affect us, are momentary existences. The duration of the object beyond the moment of sensation cannot be warranted by sensation itself, it is an extension of that sensation, a construction of our imagination. The latter constructs the image of the object, when stimulated by sensation, but sensation alone, pure sensation, points to an instantaneous object.

Here again in order to understand the Buddhist view we must contrast it with what it is opposed to, we must take into consideration the opinions of the Indian Realists. Just as Time and Space are for them real entities in which the things are residing; existence - something inherent in the existing things; efficiency is something additional to a thing when it becomes efficient; causality-a real relation uniting cause and effect; motion-a reality added to the thing when it begins to move; a Universal – a reality residing in the particular; the relation of Inherence- a reality residing in the members of that relation, - even so is Non-existence for the Realist something valid and real, it is something over and above the thing which disappears. The Buddhist denies this, Non-existence cannot exist. He denies ultimate reality to all that set of hypostasized notions. They are for him mere ideas or mere names, some of them even pseudo-ideas. A mere idea, or a mere name, is a name to which nothing separate corresponds, which has no corresponding reality of its own. A pseudo-idea is a word to which nothing at all corresponds, as, e. g., «a flower in the sky». Thus existence is for the Buddhist nothing but a name for the things existing; efficiency is the efficient thing itself; Time and Space are nothing besides the things residing in them; these things again are nothing over and above the point-instants of which they represent an integration; Causality is dependent origination of the things originating, these things themselves are the causes, there is no real causality besides their existence; motion is nothing beyond the moving thing; a Universal is not a reality "residing» in the particular thing, it is a mere idea or a mere name of the thing itself; Inherence is an unreality of a second degree, since it is admitted in order to unite the particular thing with the Universal which itself is nothing but a name.

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A book I encountered in Buddhist Studies was ‘Cult of Nothingness’, Roger Pol-Droit, which was about 19th c European interpretations of Buddhism (including Nietszche’s). Pol-Droit says that major Western 19th c philosophers interpreted the Buddhist concept of Nirvana as a nihilistic “nothingness” not because they understood the religion, but because they projected their own cultural anxieties (e.g., the rise of atheism, social revolts, and the collapse of traditional European values) onto it.

The mis-reading of śūnyatā as ‘nothing’ and Buddhism as a nihilist has been a misconception from the outset. It isn’t, and he wasn’t. Nihilism is explicitly condemned in the Buddhist texts as Ucchedavada ‘The mistaken belief that personal identity, the soul, or the mind completely perishes at death, denying the effects of karma and rebirth. Buddhism rejects this, navigating a Middle Way between annihilationism and sassatavada (the extreme of eternalism).’

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Did you know that they met and that James thought Mach especially brilliant ? James studied in Germany and commented profusely on German thinkers in his Principles of Psychology.

I believe that ‘consciousness,’ when once it has evaporated to this estate of pure diaphaneity, is on the point of disappearing altogether. It is the name of a nonentity, and has no right to a place among first principles. Those who still cling to it are clinging to a mere echo, the faint rumor left behind by the disappearing ‘soul’ upon the air of philosophy.

Note that he’s also and even especially rejecting the transcendental ego.

For the thinkers I call neo-Kantian, the word consciousness to-day does no more than signalize the fact that experience is indefeasibly dualistic in structure. It means that not subject, not object, but object-plus-subject is the minimum that can actually be. The subject-object distinction meanwhile is entirely different from that between mind and matter, from that between body and soul. Souls were detachable, had separate destinies; things could happen to them. To consciousness as such nothing can happen, for, timeless itself, it is only a witness of happenings in time, in which it plays no part. It is, in a word, but the logical correlative of ‘content’ in an Experience of which the peculiarity is that fact comes to light in it, that awareness of content takes place. Consciousness as such is entirely impersonal – ‘self’ and its activities belong to the content. To say that I am self-conscious, or conscious of putting forth volition, means only that certain contents, for which ‘self’ and ‘effort of will’ are the names, are not without witness as they occur.

Thus, for these belated drinkers at the Kantian spring, we should have to admit consciousness as an ‘epistemological’ necessity, even if we had no direct evidence of its being there.

This supposes that the consciousness is one element, moment, factor – call it what you like – of an experience of essentially dualistic inner constitution, from which, if you abstract the content, the consciousness will remain revealed to its own eye. Experience, at this rate, would be much like a paint of which the world pictures were made.
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Now my contention is exactly the reverse of this. Experience, I believe, has no such inner duplicity; and the separation of it into consciousness and content comes, not by way of subtraction, but by way of addition – the addition, to a given concrete piece of it, other sets of experiences, in connection with which severally its use or function may be of two different kinds.

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I didn’t know this, but it makes sense. Because damn it “experience” sounds like a primal stuff. He even comes off as a monist in some quotes, when I tend to take his insight to imply a radical pluralism.

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But it’s hard to tell from your posts, you keep running together Ernst Mach and A J Ayer, who are textbook examples of positivism, with the Vedanta-based essays by Wolfgang Fasching and snippets of Buddhist texts. They originate from vastly different cultures and worldviews.

One of the formative books in my philosophical life was T R V Murti, The Central Philosophy of Buddhism. It was published in 1955 and has fallen out of favour now, although one of my tutors (acftually my thesis supervisor) still endorses it. Because Murti makes extensive comparisons between the Madhyamaka of Nāgārjuna with Kant, Hegel, Bradley and other European philosophers. It was where I encountered Kant in the first place. And Murti points out that the ‘undetermined questions’ (avyakarta) of the Buddha, bear a conspicuous resemblance to Kant’s antinomies of reason.

Both the antinomies and the undetermined questions caution against seeking definite answers to many questions associated with metaphysics (whether the world has a beginning or not, whether the soul is the same as the body or not, and so on. 10 in all, in Pali Buddhism).

But all that said, there is still ‘Kant’s metaphysics’ even if it is more cognitive and epistemological than ontic. And Whitehead said that while ‘(Christianity) has always been a religion seeking a metaphysic, Buddhism is a metaphysic generating a religion.’ So it’s a mistake to equate the apophaticism of the Buddha with any kind of positivism or philosophical empiricism. It has a completely different intent. Schterbatsky makes that clear enough. It is not any kind of straightforward scientific or empirical realism, but it demands direct insight into ‘dependent origination’.

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And he said, “Whoever finds the interpretation of these sayings will not experience death.”

To me there’s a beautiful and “rational” interpretation of this. Basically it’s not the dying mortal person, essentially, who “interprets.”

He aimed to show that this view of the nature of reason is mistaken, that reason is one and the same in all thinking subjects, that it is universal and infinite, and that thinking (Denken) is not an activity performed by the individual, but rather by “the species” acting through the individual. “In thinking”, Feuerbach wrote, “I am bound together with, or rather, I am one with—indeed, I myself am—all human beings” (GW I:18).

This ties into the OP, also, because we need to account for communication. How do we share a world if "experience defines existence " ? Through signs, one might say. But what then are signs ?

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Your reading of the Feuerbach passage led me to your channel. I will investigate further. But the emphasis on ‘time’ of some of the philosophers you quote falls into place when I read Rovelli’s analysis of time. The connection is intriguing.

Additionally, I was fascinated to find in Mark 8:34 from the mouth of Jesus: “Anyone who wishes to be a follower of mine must leave self behind” (New English Bible,1970). It’s interesting to see how the institution emphasizes an altruistic interpretation of this sentiment, like they want to bury the idea of salvation through personal effort in favor of Paul’s idea of salvation by faith alone.

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I didn’t want to self-promote, but man I love that passage and wanted to share it. It’s Hegel made “existential” and “material.”

If you can share anything from/on Rovelli on the time issue, I’d gladly check it out.

I hear you on that.

My experience was Catholic ( childhood) and briefly Pentacostal (young teen). But I’ve read lots of Saint Paul, the gospels, the OT stories of kings, Job, Ecclesiastes. The KJV is just great English prose. Recently I read a giant book on all of Weber, and it includes a “realist” sociological take on the same content as the biblical “histories.” Fascinating. Weber is great.

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I think the application of the term “neutral monism” to James’s radical empiricism is a mislead. The term is Russell’s and appeared many years after James’s death, but the word ‘monism’ still implies a substance ontology that James would have rejected any such connotation.

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I know that I am synthesizing “incompatible” thinkers. I’m aiming at something universal. All quoting is quoting out of context. Our signs have a life beyond their origin.

I’m open to hearing the case that distances Mach’s very open inquiry into functional relationships between his “elements” and dependent origination in Buddhist thought. Note that I don’t pretend expertise on this issue. I’ve read a few books, and I am positively inclined toward Buddhistic philosophy.

Consider though that some experts see a strong overlap.

Although the Buddhist doctrine of causation has attracted the attention of scholars at the very outset of Buddhistic studies in Europe, its comprehension and the knowledge of its historical development have made till now but very slow progress. There is perhaps no other Buddhist doctrine which has been so utterly misunderstood and upon which such a wealth of unfounded guesses and fanciful philosophizing has been spent. We neither have any knowledge of its pre-Buddhistic sources, which are probably to be sought in Indian medical science, nor do we know much about the vicissitudes of interpretation it received in the schools of early Buddhism. Nay, although the literal translation of the Sanscrit and Pali words which have been framed for its designation cannot be anything else than Dependent Origination, the majority of scholars imagined for it every meaning, possible and impossible, except the meaning of dependent origination.
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The reason for this partly lies in the circumstance that it seemed highly improbable, too improbable beside sheer logical possibility, that the Indians should have had at so early a date in the history of human thought a doctrine of Causation so entirely modern, the same in principle as the one accepted in the most advanced modern sciences.
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The framer of this theory in Europe, Mach, went through a course of reasoning somewhat similar to the Buddhistic one. When speculation is no more interested in the existence of an Ego, when the Ego is denied, nothing remains instead of it, said he, than the causal laws, the laws of functional interdependence, in the mathematical sense, of the separate elements of existence.
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Buddhism has pushed the separateness of these elements to its extreme limit, to the mathematical point-instants, but the formula of interdependence is always the same-«this being that appears». Since the Buddhist theory of Causation is conditioned by its denial of the objective reality of the category of substance, it naturally must coincide, to a certain extent, with all those European theories which shared in the same denial. The objective reality of substance has been denied in Europe, e. g., by J. S. Mill, for whom substance is nothing but «a permanent possibility of (impermanent, i. e., momentary) sensation»; by Kant, for whom substance is but a mental Category; in our days by Bertrand Russel, for whom substances are not «permanent bits of matter», but «brief events», however possessing qualities and relations.

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The standpoint of J. S. Mill would probably have been shared, in the main, by the early Buddhists, since their moments are impermanent sense-data, sensible qualities without any substance. Stability and duration are for the Buddhist nothing but "chains of moments» following one another without intervals. The notion of a "chain of moments» corresponds very nearly to the modern notion of a «string of events».

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I very much agree. Monism is still “ingredient ontology.” But what we need to look at IMV is the structure of objects. How do we share them ? If we don’t accept indirect realism.

And then, the most important perhaps, because it opens up the rest, is the issue of the way one understands “consciousness.”

I’m confident that we agree on this point, which is nice, because I usually don’t even feel understood on this issue.

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I believe you.

But there are passages that remind one of the stoics.

Oneself is one’s own protector (refuge); what other protector (refuge) can there be ?

With oneself fully controlled, one obtains a protection (refuge) which is hard to gain.

By oneself indeed is evil done and by oneself is one defiled. By oneself is evil left undone and by oneself indeed is one purified. Purity and impurity depend on oneself. No one can purify another.

Do not follow mean things. Do not dwell in negligence. Do not embrace false views. So the world (i.e. Samsara, the cycle of existence and continuity) is not prolonged. Come, behold this world, how it resembles an ornamented royal chariot, in which fools flounder, but for the wise there is no attachment to it.

Consider Epictetus:

Remember that you must behave as at a banquet. Is anything brought round to you? Put out your hand and take a moderate share. Does it pass by you? Do not stop it. Is it not yet come? Do not yearn in desire toward it, but wait till it reaches you. So with regard to children, wife, office, riches; and you will some time or other be worthy to feast with the gods. And if you do not so much as take the things which are set before you, but are able even to forego them, then you will not only be worthy to feast with the gods, but to rule with them also. For, by thus doing, Diogenes and Heraclitus, and others like them, deservedly became divine, and were so recognized.

The condition and characteristic of a vulgar person is that he never looks for either help or harm from himself, but only from externals. The condition and characteristic of a philosopher is that he looks to himself for all help or harm.

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I get the impression that you and I differ when we consider non-human entities like fire hydrants. Apologies if I’m misinterpreting but for you, experience is human experience, so we explain our sharing of a world in terms of signs. I am unfamiliar with semiotics so from my naive perspective a sign is a representation, a commonly adopted (or shared) abstraction.

I don’t think the problem arises if one follows Whitehead into his panexperientialism, but I understand the reluctance to follow him down that path. Thomas Nagel expresses his dislike of panpsychism by describing it as “obviously ridiculous” and “counterintuitive” mainly on account of the combination problem (identified by James in his Principles of Psychology where he called it the “mind dust problem”). In his book The View from Nowhere Nagel writes that panpsychism has “the faintly sickening odor of something put together in the metaphysical laboratory.”

I think Wheeler’s objection worth repeating here: “Each of us a private universe? Preposterous! Each of us see the same universe? Also preposterous!” Wheeler was expressing his frustration at the logical impasse to which quantum mechanics leads us: if reality is created by individual acts of observation (“participancy”) then it implies everyone lives in a solipsistic “private universe,” which would contradict our shared experience. But if we insist on a single, pre-existing shared world, this contradicts the quantum mechanical finding that properties are not defined until measured. He found both extremes “preposterous” yet could not find a middle ground before his death in 2008.

If we follow James into the non-dual aspects of his pure experience, but stop short of his pragmatic decision to consider only some portions of pure experience as ‘knowers,’ then it opens up the possibility of all portions being both knowers and known. I suspect that this is what Whitehead built on.

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Currently I tend to think only of (some ? which ? ) organisms as conscious. I invoke aliens not from some special interest but to insist on just how open the forum is in theory if not yet in practice. Currently I’d be reluctant to associate a “streaming of the world” with a fire hydrant. I’m more open to digital systems as conscious. There is some bias in this which I can’t justify conceptually. So I am just trying to report this bias honestly. I’m in no position to call an even more open view crazy or ridiculous. The consciousness issue is very very slippery, because it is ethical as well as conceptual.

For what it’s worth, I don’t take “phenomenal streams” to be absolute structures. The past exists “in the present” in the historical meaning of signs. For me signs are lifeworld objects that take on special roles. Because you know English, these symbols “signify” for you in a way they would not for those who don’t. Moreover I trust that you are far more able to understand in general what I’m talking about here. I even “direct my signs” at a “historically generated sense of you” that is “here now” as I continue to type. This is why I make a big deal out of Heidegger, as he tries to tackle this “memory that lives here now” as a basic feature of human existence. (Really it lives in the future that I chase in my on-the-way-ness, or something like that.)

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I haven’t fully digested Whitehead. I love some of the stuff that I can understand, but I didn’t get sufficiently entangled to avoid being distracted by other books. So I am very much an open ear on Whitehead. Please share anything that you think would help. I think the only part of panpsychism that I would object to would be a reification of consciousness. I don’t know if the “real” (best) panpsychism reifies consciousness. I’m assuming it doesn’t, if you are a fan. My own “unwritten doctrine” is an object splintered ontology. “Unwritten” is sort of a joke. I just mean that “moments” of objects can be taken as fundamental. So “streams” are just pragmatic syntheses. Selves are not absolute. This is already in Mach and Vedanta and Feuerbach. Maybe you’ve peeked in on my eccentric reading of Plato’s unwritten etc. Not a hit among the Platonists so far.

Now the question is whether there are moments “from the POV” of a fire-hydrant. If so, this is very close to Harman’s wild appropriation of Heidegger. For Harman, we humans make too much of the human side of the relation. We should seriously consider object-object relations that happen in a darkness that we humans can never pierce. I currently can’t really feel this. I agree with Harman on the “darkness under objects.” But I’m sort of stuck outside of his deeper doctrine. With open ears however.