I hear you. From an embodied cognition perspective, at least, I don’t think it makes much sense to talk about the cosmos entirely apart from the creatures who encounter and make sense of it. The claims that it exists or doesn’t exist may both reach beyond the conditions that make such concepts meaningful in the first place.
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It comes from attributing metaphysical significance to scientific realism. Looking at Bryan Magee’s Schopenhauer’s Philosophy, surely an ur-text of philosophical idealism, I found this snippet, directly relevant to the question posed in the OP:
I have often heard professional philosophers in Britain, including gifted ones, assert that according to transcendental idealism ‘everything exists in a mind, or in minds’ or ‘existence is mental’. This is a radical error. It is not what Kant or Schopenhauer were saying, nor is it what they believed. On the contrary, both of them believed that the abiding reality from which we are screened off by the ever-changing surface of our contingent and ephemeral experiences exists in itself, independent of minds and their perceptions or experiences. If reality had consisted only of perception, or only of experience, then it would presumably have been possible for us to encompass it exhaustively in perception or experience, to know it through and through, without remainder. But that is not so, and the chief clout of transcendental idealism is contained in the insight that while it is possible for us to perceive or experience or think or envisage only in categories determined by our own apparatus, whatever exists cannot in itself exist in terms of those categories, because existence as such cannot be in categories at all.
My bolds. It is clear to me that this is how just about everyone is interpreting idealism in this discussion.
Nice. This is valuable stuff.
Do you read most Neoplatonism this way too?
You are just repeating yourself, apparently ignroing my having said that time can also be thought of as change.
And then this:
Reads like unargued nonsense to me, and a presumption to know what cannot be certainly known, but can only be inferred in terms of what seems most plausible. (Well I guess since it inevitably can be nothing more than a mere assertion if it is taken to be an ontological statement, it therefore cannot be argued for, so no surprises there).
I think this is incorrect because it presumes that there is a fact of the matter as to what is meaningful or not. If “exist” is tendentiously defined as that which stands out for some percipient then of course anything outside of perception does not exist on that definition. But even there the formulation “neither exists nor does not exist” is not correct, the thing in question doesn’t exist.
I have no difficulty imagining that things might exist outside of my perception of them, or my imagining them to exist; I just can’t know absolutely for sure whether they do or not. This “neither exists nor doesn’t exist” is a sleight of hand if it is taken to point to anything beyond that lack of ultimate epistemic certainty about such questions, in my view.
Just as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so I would say meaning is in the mind of the thinker―in other words you might find some statement meaningful and I might not, and there is no fact of the matter as to whether it is meaningful or not (given of course that it is not obviously gibberish).
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It’s such a huge topic, there’s mountains of reading to do. Although I have found, and will recommend, a recent book on Plotinus by a current independent scholar, one of the dozen or so books I’m currently part-way through.
You say that of everything I write about this topic, so I’ll abandon the effort of trying to explain it further.
Saying so doesn’t really give any helpful information. Why do you say so, would be more helpful.
Of course we can say that existence itself, if it is anything more than merely conceptual cannot exist in categories, since categories are conceptual. But there is nothing to say that the nature of existence itself doesn’t determine the categories we think in terms of, if fact that would not seem to be (to me at least ) the most plausible conclusion. What could “our own apparatus” possibly be? Something closed of from, unformed and uninformed, by existence of both our bodies and the environment?
Imagine yourself in eternally perfect peace and serenity―why would you choose to holiday in a world of pain and suffering?
I think this is something you either click with or you don’t. In some respects it reminds me of the hard problem of consciousness, insofar as some people immediately see the problem and others simply don’t.
I don’t think it’s a sleight of hand. In fact, I find it compelling. My best quick explanation is as follows. If you handed a mobile phone to someone from 1700, they wouldn’t see what we see. They would perceive, perhaps, a black piece of glass that lights up, but they wouldn’t be able to make sense of it as a phone. It wouldn’t fit into the web of interrelated meanings that makes a phone a phone for us. They wouldn’t see apps, messages, icons, or the internet. Those symbols and functions would be meaningless to them.
For me, there is a real sense in which the object, as a phone, neither exists or doesn’t exist for them. Of course, the object is still there, but its meaning is not. That’s roughly how I understand this issue. We don’t simply encounter objects; we encounter them through a framework of understanding that allows them to appear as meaningful things in the first place.
@Wayfarer does the above work for you here?
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Further…? You haven’t explained it at all!
Idealists will say that we don’t have apparent materialism. Materialism is just as speculative and metaphysical as idealism, perhaps more so. What we have is appearances, and materialism is extravagant in assuming anything further beyond those appearances. Berkeley went on about this at some length if I remember. The regularity of experience is explained by Berkeley by appeal to the universal perceiver, namely God. Sprigge was a panpsychist idealist and appealed to the consciousness in all things to ground their persistence. However it is unclear if these moves are even necessary for the idealist. If matter can obey regular laws of nature, why can’t ideas? Why does an idealist need to explain this any more than a materialist?
Yes, and the fact that it is meaningful to some and not to others is precisely why there is no fact of the matter as to whether it is meaningful to say that something exists independently of the human.
Sure, they wouldn’t understand it as a phone, but they would still see the same object. That is why I say the constructivist model is only half, or way less than half, of the whole story.
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I totally get that you don’t see it that way. Wouldn’t it be odd if everyone agreed with each other? Thanks for the chat.
@bert1 My initial question was an attempt to make sense of objects and physical processes in a world ultimately “created” by consciousness. As far as I can tell, that question has now been answered, at least if we adopt a more transcendental idealist account. I’m neither a materialist nor an idealist. I’m just curious about how various positions makes sense of the world and what follows from the assumptions.
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One more snippet from Bryan Mageee Schopenhauer’s Philosophy before doing some yard work:
Kant says “'If I take away the thinking subject, the whole material world must vanish, as this world is nothing but the phenomenal appearance in the sensibility of our own subject, and is a species of this subject’s representations.”
…An objection would run: everyone knows that the earth, and a fortiori the universe, existed for a long time before there were any living beings, and therefore any perceiving subjects. But according to what Kant has just been quoted as saying, that is impossible.
Schopenhauer’s defence of Kant on this score was …that the objector has not understood to the very bottom the Kantian demonstration that time is one of the forms of our sensibility. The earth, say, as it was before there was life, is a field of empirical enquiry in which we have come to know a great deal; its reality is no more being denied than is the reality of perceived objects in the same room.
The point is, the whole of the empirical world in space and time is the creation of our understanding, which apprehends all the objects of empirical knowledge within it as being in some part of that space and at some part of that time: and this is as true of the earth before there was life as it is of the pen I am now holding a few inches in front of my face and seeing slightly out of focus as it moves across the paper.
This, incidentally, illustrates a difficulty in the way of understanding which transcendental idealism has permanently to contend with: the assumptions of ‘the inborn realism which arises from the original disposition of the intellect’ enter unawares into the way in which the statements of transcendental idealism are understood, so that these statements appear faulty in ways in which, properly understood, they are not. …
This, of course, is one of the explanations for the almost unfathomably deep counterintuitiveness of transcendental idealism, and also for the general notion of ‘depth’ with which people associate Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy. Something akin to it is the reason for much of the prolonged, self-disciplined meditation involved in a number of Eastern religious practices.”
Magee notes a little further on, that a great many distinguished philosophers reject all of this, even some who have made their names as noted interpreters of Kant. Me, I think there’s a kind of gestalt shift involved — a change of perspective. I’ve whimsically called it ‘going through the looking glass’ — but then, it’s also quite possible that Lewis Carroll was someone who had done that.
Just to be clear, I’m not objecting to people holding other views. If someone says that the idea that things could exist independently of humans is meaningless to them I would take no issue with that. My argument is with those who claim that the idea is meaningless as such―I am opposed to unargued dogma in other words.
What do you personally think? Do you think the idea is meaningless as such? Is the idea meaningless to you?
As I said, I find the argument convincing.
Thanks. I think this is one of those framings that people are either convinced by or not. And I can also see how there is a way in which for some this is a violation of a law of logic: the principle of non-contradiction, perhaps. For something to be and not be could be confounding.
Yes, but materialism, or maybe just the sense of material things, must be permitted, re: “……otherwise there would follow the absurd proposition that there is an appearance without anything that appears…..” Bxxvii
Which is just to say materialism is necessary for the proper transcendental idealist, only insofar as he posits that the human sensory physiology requires the material constitution of that which appears, however varietal that constitution may be, given the sensations which are their effects.
Beyond that is mere inference, which can be quite extravagant indeed.