# Identity, Difference, Ideality
**URL:** https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/identity-difference-ideality/1337
**Category:** Metaphysics & Epistemology
**Created:** [June 14, 2026, 4:03am UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/identity-difference-ideality/1337 "2026-06-14T04:03:35Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 3
### Author:  [@Joshs](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/Joshs)
#### Post date: [June 15, 2026, 12:43am UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/identity-difference-ideality/1337/41 "2026-06-15T00:43:38Z")
> [@j\_j](#):
>
> > [@VerticalOntology](#):
> >
> > To what extent does a thing remain itself? In my view, this is simple: as long as it can remain in the same network of relations, in the same role.
>
> I basically agree. It is simple but also illuminating. Sellars approach to meaning is like this, and it cuts through an ocean of noise and confusion.
>
> I see “relations” as themselves identities. I can grasp the structure of Chess as a “thing,” as an intentional object.
But what does it mean to ‘relate’? Does this not imply a difference being made? Systems dont create themselves, they are produced through our active interventions. And when differences are made to systems of relations, doesn’t this alter all the relations within the system, so that it is only relatively speaking the ‘same’ system of relations as we actually relate to it? If so, should we call this self-differentiating system an identity? That would be the post-structuralist critique of structuralism’s assumption of structures centered around an identity.
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### Author:  [@j\_j](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/j_j)
#### Post date: [June 15, 2026, 2:29am UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/identity-difference-ideality/1337/42 "2026-06-15T02:29:43Z")
> [@Joshs](#):
>
> If so, should we call **this** self-differentiating **system** an identity?
I don’t think of identity in terms of substance. We just talk about _things_, even if those things are “events” or “systems of pure difference.”
Consider Saussure’s “sound-image” or Goodman’s “characters.” Consider that you read this chain of signs as a chain of signs with their own “virtual-enacted” boundaries.
I’m pro-difference in general but also trying to point out the “digitality” that haunts our continuum.
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### Author:  [@j\_j](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/j_j)
#### Post date: [June 15, 2026, 3:37am UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/identity-difference-ideality/1337/43 "2026-06-15T03:37:23Z")
> [@Joshs](#):
>
> nd when differences are made to systems of relations, doesn’t this alter all the relations within the system, so that it is only relatively speaking the ‘same’ system of relations as we actually relate to it?
Yes, **only relatively speaking.** I suggest that **all** identity is like this, only relative or virtual or ideal.
Of course I am “generously” reading Plato as “almost already Heidegger” here. I am able to read Plato in a new way thanks to the “opposition” discourse that _takes_ Plato as an avatar of secret substance.
De Man writes a great essay on Derrida’s investigation of Rousseau. For De Man, Derrida strategically misread Rousseau, while missing the reading that anticipates Derrida’s own work. De Man and Derrida were friends, which makes this situation even richer. De Man playfully credits Derrida with doing this knowingly, which I don’t find plausible.
It looks to me that Derrida gets a “genuine” Platonism from Saussure via his sound-images (and other paraphernalia ). The signi **fied** is “less interesting really.” It is the _sound-image_ , the signifier, that allows for repetition, or “makes” the repetition a repetition, that “links” two qualitatively different events as “faces” of the same “ideal” repeatable event. Two differing sayings of the same word. How much of philosophy is compacted in the strangeness of something so familiar ?
So difference and identity are like left and right, inseparable, and identity is “ideal.” So difference as speakable is likewise ideal. Yet “pure quality” is out there raging, which we point at with a “bastard discourse.” Brouwer’s “choice sequences” _try_ to get there in mathematical terms. It’s not easy to “speak” the continuum since speech employs the “ideal” or “discrete/atomic/digital” as its basis.
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### Author:  [@VerticalOntology](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/VerticalOntology)
#### Post date: [June 15, 2026, 4:05am UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/identity-difference-ideality/1337/44 "2026-06-15T04:05:59Z")
> [@Joshs](#):
>
> But what does it mean to ‘relate’? Does this not imply a difference being made? Systems dont create themselves, they are produced through our active interventions. And when differences are made to systems of relations, doesn’t this alter all the relations within the system, so that it is only relatively speaking the ‘same’ system of relations as we actually relate to it? If so, should we call this self-differentiating system an identity? That would be the post-structuralist critique of structuralism’s assumption of structures centered around an identity.
The claim that systems do not create themselves is not neutral. Why should objects exist independently of us, while systems do not? Why can we not think of relations as primary, with objects appearing only afterwards, as “nodes” within a network of relations?
Such an approach can look quite natural in some areas of abstract algebra, for instance. And even in an everyday sense, examples are not hard to find. If you are very hungry, the relation of nourishment becomes primary for you. Within that network of relations, almost anything can be included and made into an object — a node within that network.
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### Author:  [@VerticalOntology](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/VerticalOntology)
#### Post date: [June 15, 2026, 4:09am UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/identity-difference-ideality/1337/45 "2026-06-15T04:09:57Z")
> [@j\_j](#):
>
> I see “relations” as themselves identities. I can grasp the structure of Chess as a “thing,” as an intentional object.
Yes, that is a logical move. In mathematics, relations can be treated as formal objects like anything else. But phenomenologically the difference is significant.
It is much easier to think an open-ended action than an open-ended object. An open-ended object requires complex abstract constructions, which can drift toward mysticism. An open-ended action, by contrast, is much more intuitively accessible.
Chess can indeed be grasped as a “thing,” as an intentional object. But it is first given through possible moves, practices, and transformations within play.
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### Author:  [@j\_j](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/j_j)
#### Post date: [June 15, 2026, 5:34am UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/identity-difference-ideality/1337/46 "2026-06-15T05:34:55Z")
> [@VerticalOntology](#):
>
> It is much easier to think an open-ended action than an open-ended object. An open-ended object requires complex abstract constructions, which can drift toward mysticism. An open-ended action, by contrast, is much more intuitively accessible.
>
> Chess can indeed be grasped as a “thing,” as an intentional object. But it is first given through possible moves, practices, and transformations within play.
I basically agree. I might say that we **enact** objects. It’s our continual speech that “gives being” to the sound-image.
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### Author:  [@VerticalOntology](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/VerticalOntology)
#### Post date: [June 15, 2026, 8:31am UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/identity-difference-ideality/1337/47 "2026-06-15T08:31:04Z")
> [@j\_j](#):
>
> I basically agree. I might say that we **enact** objects. It’s our continual speech that “give being” to the sound-image.
I am trying to find an approach not at the point where the object is not identical with itself in the flow of time, but by seeing what happens if we think of time as something that can be ruptured: time that can go backwards, change the past, fix the future, partly move with the flow of common time and partly against it. Or perhaps not move in the usual sense at all — moving simultaneously, or in multiple ways.
The non-identity of objects and signs is the result of such a meta-time.
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### Author:  [@Corvus](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/Corvus)
#### Post date: [June 15, 2026, 8:47am UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/identity-difference-ideality/1337/48 "2026-06-15T08:47:22Z")
> [@RussellA](#):
>
> Words only have meaning within the context of either the other text (“I thought you would sacrifice your rook”) or a physical situation (shouting rook!!!).
Does it confirm that words alone cannot stand, pass or generate clear and definite meanings to the readers or listeners?
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### Author:  [@Corvus](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/Corvus)
#### Post date: [June 15, 2026, 8:54am UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/identity-difference-ideality/1337/49 "2026-06-15T08:54:09Z")
> [@j\_j](#):
>
> But human vocalizations are heard “immediately” as chains of repeatable words. The sound is a typed-token. The vocalized word is heard _primarily_ as **the word** and not the “pure sound.”
If you were hearing a foreign language with no understanding of what it means when spoken, would it not be heard as “pure sound”?
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### Author:  [@j\_j](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/j_j)
#### Post date: [June 15, 2026, 8:58am UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/identity-difference-ideality/1337/50 "2026-06-15T08:58:27Z")
> [@Corvus](#):
>
> If you were hearing a foreign language with no understanding of what it means when spoken, would it not be heard as “pure sound”?
In my experience, no. But of course I am familiar with my language and aware that there are many. But if aliens were talking, it would maybe arrive at my ears as “confusing sound.”
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### Author:  [@j\_j](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/j_j)
#### Post date: [June 15, 2026, 8:59am UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/identity-difference-ideality/1337/51 "2026-06-15T08:59:21Z")
> [@VerticalOntology](#):
>
> I am trying to find an approach not at the point where the object is not identical with itself in the flow of time, but by seeing what happens if we think of time as something that can be ruptured: time that can go backwards, change the past, fix the future, partly move with the flow of common time and partly against it. Or perhaps not move in the usual sense at all — moving simultaneously, or in multiple ways.
>
> The non-identity of objects and signs is the result of such a meta-time.
It sounds like a fascinating path. I can only dimly guess at what you mean at this point of course.
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### Author:  [@RussellA](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/RussellA)
#### Post date: [June 15, 2026, 9:03am UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/identity-difference-ideality/1337/52 "2026-06-15T09:03:04Z")
> [@j\_j](#):
>
> Yes, I think the type/token approach is great here.
I perceive a colour when 650nm enters my eye and I perceive a colour when 730nm enters my eye. I recognise that there is something the same about these two colours, which is named “red”.
A wavelength of 670nm may never have entered my eye in my life, but when I see it for the first time, I can still recognise it as “red”.
The colour I perceive when 650nm enters my eye is a token, and “red” is a type.
I hypothesise that the brain has evolved over millions of years with the ability to unify any wavelength from 620nm to 750nm as a survival tool. It makes sense for the brain to organise colours into red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet.
Platonic Forms are unnecessary. A token is one instance of perception. A type is what the brain has evolved to do as a survival tool, and is something we call a concept.
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### Author:  [@VerticalOntology](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/VerticalOntology)
#### Post date: [June 15, 2026, 9:05am UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/identity-difference-ideality/1337/53 "2026-06-15T09:05:37Z")
> [@j\_j](#):
>
> It sounds like a fascinating path. I can only dim guess at what you mean at this point of course.
You are right: I am expressing myself somewhat obscurely here, because I have not yet fully settled on the theme myself. I have already written here about several intuitions. For example, that the time of the sign and the time of dance are different — they are objects generated by different temporalities. Artificial intelligence obviously exists in another kind of time: multiple, discontinuous, and with a completely different essence of identity. I also wrote about the phenomenological experience of throwing a knife — when a fixed future time seems to draw the present into itself.
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### Author:  [@j\_j](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/j_j)
#### Post date: [June 15, 2026, 9:17am UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/identity-difference-ideality/1337/54 "2026-06-15T09:17:13Z")
> [@RussellA](#):
>
> I recognise that there is **something the same** about these two colours, which is **named “red”.**
Sure.
> [@RussellA](#):
>
> A wavelength of 670nm may never have entered my eye in my life, but when I see it for the first time, I can still recognise it as “red”.
Likely enough.
> [@RussellA](#):
>
> I hypothesise that the brain has evolved over millions of years with the ability to unify any wavelength from 620nm to 750nm as a survival tool. It makes sense for the brain to organise colours into red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet.
Reasonable.
> [@RussellA](#):
>
> Platonic Forms are unnecessary. A token is one instance of perception. A type is what the brain has evolved to do as a survival tool, and is something we call a **concept.**
My objection would just be that people don’t necessarily _agree_ on what Plato’s forms are all about. I’m inclined, lately, to try to read Plato as a far more sophisticated thinker than he tends to be taken for. Maybe it’s daffy, or maybe Derrida is understanding rather than debunking Plato, etc.
For context, I don’t think indirect realism is coherent. If concepts are “internal mind stuff” then your nanometer wavelengths are conceptual and therefore internal. The scientific image _as a whole_ becomes a mere internal map of internal perception,etc. And there remains the mystery of how we manage to have this conversation, how signs leap o’er the gulf twixt subjects.
Now maybe you are a Kantian indirect realist, so then you have an internal _X_ to mark the utterly ineffable “_X_-ternal.” There is a certain coherence in this, which pushed Kant beyond Locke, but then the scientific image is just the mapping of an intersubjective space. Later phenomenalists just dropped the whole inside/outside framework altogether.
And I don’t personally believe in consciousness as an internal picture stuff that is between us and the world. So for me “concepts” are a certain kind of “idea” or “form.” But let me emphasize that Goodman’s lingo is just as good as Plato’s. It’s the “ideality” of identity and difference ( whatever you want to call it ) that fascinates me.
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### Author:  [@Corvus](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/Corvus)
#### Post date: [June 15, 2026, 10:00am UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/identity-difference-ideality/1337/55 "2026-06-15T10:00:26Z")
> [@j\_j](#):
>
> But if aliens were talking, it would maybe arrive at my ears as “confusing sound.”
If you lived with the aliens, listening to their language spoken everyday, you managed to pick up some of the words and expressions, and if you were able to communicate with them, would it sound meaningful, rather than confusing?
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### Author:  [@j\_j](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/j_j)
#### Post date: [June 15, 2026, 10:03am UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/identity-difference-ideality/1337/56 "2026-06-15T10:03:19Z")
Yes indeed. I think it would “come into focus.” Now this is assuming that they aren’t too damned smart for me to pick up their lingo. Perhaps they talk simple for me like I’m a fun little puppy. That would help.
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### Author:  [@j\_j](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/j_j)
#### Post date: [June 15, 2026, 10:06am UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/identity-difference-ideality/1337/57 "2026-06-15T10:06:52Z")
> [@VerticalOntology](#):
>
> partly move with the flow of common time and partly against it.
I think “common time” is a nice background here. This common time has a certain virtuality. It is “given as” the numbers on a clock, for instance. Items in the world “yell at us” this common time.
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### Author:  [@Corvus](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/Corvus)
#### Post date: [June 15, 2026, 10:09am UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/identity-difference-ideality/1337/58 "2026-06-15T10:09:36Z")
[ ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iF9Erkepfv0)
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### Author:  [@j\_j](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/j_j)
#### Post date: [June 15, 2026, 10:13am UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/identity-difference-ideality/1337/59 "2026-06-15T10:13:41Z")
I went to school for math, but sometimes I think I should have gone for linguistics, because it has computer-science style math (formal grammars ) but also connects intensely with philosophy. I’m watching the vid now. Very fun stuff, and I think this linguist has a great job.
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### Author:  [@VerticalOntology](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/VerticalOntology)
#### Post date: [June 15, 2026, 10:13am UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/identity-difference-ideality/1337/60 "2026-06-15T10:13:58Z")
> [@j\_j](#):
>
> I think “common time” is a nice background here. This common time has a certain virtuality. It is “given as” the numbers on a clock, for instance. Items in the world “yell at us” this common time.
I suppose that there is no such thing as common time. Perhaps there is a set of separate events, part of which moves with the common flow, and part of which moves against it. And although objects in the world shimmer somewhat mysteriously, as if being itself were “pushing” them out, it is difficult to extract meta-time from object-time. Heidegger proposed looking for it in phenomenology and Dasein. I suggest additionally considering physics, myths, and religious traditions.
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