# 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:** 9
**Page:** 7
### Author:  [@John](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/John)
#### Post date: [June 18, 2026, 3:14am UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/identity-difference-ideality/1337/121 "2026-06-18T03:14:25Z")
> [@FireOlogist](#):
>
> There are two conclusions about me or “A”:
A third is that you are the entire unique, self-organizing process of change. Seen this way you are like everything else, a project that is finished only when it ceases to exist.
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### Author:  [@j\_j](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/j_j)
#### Post date: [June 18, 2026, 4:11am UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/identity-difference-ideality/1337/122 "2026-06-18T04:11:09Z")
Perhaps I can persuade you to tarry more on the sound-image. Sure, the “meaning issue” is juicy, but we probably agree already on that. I bring up the sound-image as the collision of “ideality” and “quality.” I’m hoping someone else out there will find a rich strangeness in this phenomenon, and tarry with it.
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### Author:  [@j\_j](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/j_j)
#### Post date: [June 18, 2026, 4:13am UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/identity-difference-ideality/1337/123 "2026-06-18T04:13:12Z")
> [@FireOlogist](#):
>
> If the modern philosopher honestly thinks that ontologically, in the world, nothing grounds the static, fixed permanence of a substance (a thing) being a substance, because the “world” is another word for ‘change changing changes’, then there is nothing more to say. A world of utterly amorphous change leaves nothing to distinguish or to become new or to become a thing.
Right. So even if we allow a drift in the structure of the world, we depend on this structure to talk about it.
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### Author:  [@Astorre](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/Astorre)
#### Post date: [June 18, 2026, 4:29am UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/identity-difference-ideality/1337/124 "2026-06-18T04:29:00Z")
> [@FireOlogist](#):
>
> There are two conclusions about me or “A”:
>
> 1. Me doesn’t ever happen. It’s an illusion for you to be thinking you are reading a post from me, because that “me” who wrote this post was never there, and by the time you read this, I’ve moved on (as if I ever was) making ‘me’ a useless, empty imagination. (Same for you, as “you” didn’t just read what I wrote above, someone else did, namely 𝐴𝑡𝑥-1.) So the conclusion here is that “A” is a phantom ghost, hollow and illusory - at best, a tactic used in an epistemological process to facilitate imagination about change. There are no “things”.
> 2. There is something about me that remains through change, and that is the _real_ me. In this case, all the changing things about me are non-essential. This would be like saying that I am a “rational animal”, and this rational animal is the one who is writing this post. But in this case, everything interesting and unique and particular about me, as these change, all become swept away from me. Instead of having no essence, I have no properties, other than “rational animal”. In this case, the only thing that matters about being a person is the same for every person. Personality and particularity remain dead, but being a thing called “person” is saved as an instance of a universal essence such as “rational animal”.
>
> Neither of these conclusions are satisfactory at all.
I like this. What’s more, it’s pleasant to see the process of becoming unfold right before your eyes. But since some previous states of the current state can be preserved in my memory, I can capture that very process of becoming.
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### Author:  [@Astorre](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/Astorre)
#### Post date: [June 18, 2026, 4:33am UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/identity-difference-ideality/1337/125 "2026-06-18T04:33:45Z")
> [@John](#):
>
> A third is that you are the entire unique, self-organizing process of change. Seen this way you are like everything else, a project that is finished only when it ceases to exist.
I find this a (totalizing) dialectic that, for its own purposes, discards differences. Your position is personally interesting to me, but I would add: a project that perpetuates itself in contradiction and irreducibility to itself or to anything, the telos of which is revealed only in retrospect.
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### Author:  [@Joshs](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/Joshs)
#### Post date: [June 18, 2026, 4:35am UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/identity-difference-ideality/1337/126 "2026-06-18T04:35:49Z")
> [@FireOlogist](#):
>
> Neither of these conclusions are satisfactory at all.
I notice you left out a third possible conclusion: events depend on, by emerging from, previous events. So there is a relationality and a sort of mutual belonging linking the before and the after, the me of a minute ago and the me that appears now. Not just punctual, utterly separate and independent presents arbitrarily, randomly and meaninglessly paired to each other via temporal contiguity.
Instead, differences which resonate with each other, morph into each other, carrying forward the past into the present. Events occur into an implying. This is neither a thinking of the self-same (your second conclusion) nor the merely different (your first conclusion) but a continuing to be the same differently, an intricacy within transformation. This allows us to think together pattern, order, norm and continuity on the one hand , and alterity, change and difference on the other.
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### Author:  [@John](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/John)
#### Post date: [June 18, 2026, 5:14am UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/identity-difference-ideality/1337/127 "2026-06-18T05:14:42Z")
> [@Astorre](#):
>
> I find this a (totalizing) dialectic that, for its own purposes, discards differences. Your position is personally interesting to me, but I would add: a project that perpetuates itself in contradiction and irreducibility to itself or to anything, the telos of which is revealed only in retrospect.
I’m not sure what you mean by “discards differences”. Differences within any “project” are ineliminable―constantly arising since it is a process of _change_. Also each project is unique, which means different, even if more or less similar, to all others. So difference is inherent on these two fronts.
I think I understand the “irreducibility” part, but can you explain what you mean by “perpetuates itself in contradiction”? My guess is that you mean it is from moment to moment both the same and different. If that is what you meant, then I would say the sameness applies to the whole project and the differences are from one moment to the next. An analogy might be say a film, where each frame is different, and yet they are snapshots of the same process, which is the whole film.
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### Author:  [@Astorre](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/Astorre)
#### Post date: [June 18, 2026, 5:24am UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/identity-difference-ideality/1337/128 "2026-06-18T05:24:21Z")
> [@John](#):
>
> I think I understand the “irreducibility” part, but can you explain what you mean by “perpetuates itself in contradiction”? My guess is that you mean it is from moment to moment both the same and different. If that is what you meant, then I would say the sameness applies to the whole project and the differences are from one moment to the next. An analogy might be say a film, where each frame is different, and yet they are snapshots of the same process, which is the whole film.
This phrase is largely literary, and I intend it to spur the reader into self-reflection. The point is that at a certain point in philosophizing, we inevitably encounter the limits of language. Perhaps our language itself largely echoes our desire to reduce to the whole (I wrote about this, I think, the day before yesterday in this thread). From here, I would be unable to satisfy your request and express this intuition beyond what has already been said.
But pay attention to what you’re doing next: understanding the process as a video film where frames follow frames. The point is that, in exploring the process, we discovered that we find it difficult to imagine it as anything other than a succession of frames (since cognition itself is an attempt to take a snapshot). At the same time, even increasing the frame rate to any number, something “between frames” will still remain in the world itself. A rapid succession of frames looks like life, but it is still not life itself, given what is missed and discarded as irrelevant.
It seems I have said a lot, but still have not said anything useful on your question.
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### Author:  [@John](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/John)
#### Post date: [June 18, 2026, 10:21pm UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/identity-difference-ideality/1337/129 "2026-06-18T22:21:27Z")
> [@Astorre](#):
>
> The point is that at a certain point in philosophizing, we inevitably encounter the limits of language. Perhaps our language itself largely echoes our desire to reduce to the whole (I wrote about this, I think, the day before yesterday in this thread). From here, I would be unable to satisfy your request and express this intuition beyond what has already been said.
I agree with you about encountering the limits of langauge, in the sense that we find that what we are saying in philosophy is never adequate, always contains the possibility of many other perspectives and so on. Philosophy is, as I seem to remember reading in Hegel somewhere, but have never subsequently been able to find the source (perhaps I dreamed it) “The same old stew, reheated”.
Anyway, I like the way you express your ideas, and I think I caught something of your intuition.
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