The identity of a rook in chess derives from the name rook, as long as the name rook means a chess piece.
The identity of a dog derives from the name rook, as long as the name rook means an animal.
The identity of an object derives from its name, as long as the name means the object being referred to.
How do you know if your Rook means the chess Rook, when it is written just “Rook”? How do you know it is not Rook the dog?
That makes sense.
The physical universe is in a state of constant change
From this constant change, the mind derives stable essences. Things such as trees, mountains and tables. In naming things, the mind creates identities that don’t exist in the physical world.
The Indirect Realist believes that objects such as trees, mountains and tables only exist in the mind as named concepts, and are illusions derived from the physical universe.
Identities as named objects only exist in the mind and are derived from differences in the physical universe. IE, difference existed in the universe prior to identity in the mind.
I don’t know what the single word “Rook” refers to.
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!!!).
There’s a lot of talking of “thing-in-itself” going on here. Identity is a never-ending “tapestry” an umbrella of a multiplicity of termed “things-in-themselves.” “Will” “Heredity” “Taste” “Style” etc etc.
Viewing the gradations is where you’ll see the subtle changes that amount to a shift we eventually notice.
Change occurs when a new drive practices mastery and reconfigures the rank ordering of drives.
I digress… as Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence does detail this…
- If a man has character, he has also his typical experience, which always recurs.
In Will to Power, Nietzsche describes all processes as something which can be interpreted as a “being.” This makes sense as the rank ordering of drives dictates the recurring factors in strength and regularity.
Whose reading of Will to Power
and Eternal Return do you prefer? I’m influenced both by Klossowski’s and Deleuze’s.
Yes, that was the answer I was expecting.
I like this question. It reminds me of Radical Ontic Structural Realism (ROSR), where there are no ‘things’ but only relations – and then the question becomes “how can there be relations without relata?” And so to “how can there be differences without things that differ?”
What you’re suggesting is that difference is fundamental and that identities are derivative. The reason I like this is because it brings William James to mind, and his distinction between perception and conception. James argued that for empiricism to be complete it must encompass felt relations, putting things and their relations on an equal footing (I think this would be classed as Moderate Ontic Structural Realism). Moreover, that we are inclined to treat our conceptual world models as the starting point at the expense of perceptual experience – a propensity that he calls “vicious intellectualism.” And any attempt to explain the world with concepts alone can never replicate the shifting interpenetrating flux that is the stream of pure experience within which the conceived world emerges.
So I’m interpreting you to be suggesting that identity is an emergent phenomenon operating at the conceptual level but not at the level of perceptual experience.
This makes sense to me because we humans (and other species but I wouldn’t like to have to hazard a guess as to how far down the phylogenetic tree this might go) have to place a lot of significance on whatever aspects of the world remain invariant over the time frames that are of significance to us.
I think it is a problem to assume that a thing can exist by itself and that it has something like a soul or Plato’s Idea. A thing does not exist by itself, but only within a network of relations, or of potential relations. What question is pursued by the identity of an object? It is complete understanding, what Socrates was striving for. But today this question is already naive.
Existence itself has meaning only in relation to someone or something, or for someone or something. Roughly speaking, a similar understanding exists in physics. 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.
The paradox of the Ship of Theseus is difficult only at first glance: it is the same ship for the sailors, and a completely different one for the wood-boring insects that have begun to eat it.
I know all that, but I failed to see the connection to ‘identity, difference, ideality’, for the reasons I stated
Is the n- word “token” ? Yes, I think the type/token approach is great here. Given that our entire world is “articulated” in terms of layers and layers of typed tokens, I’m suggesting that maybe Plato was trying to point this out. Maybe ideas are “just” types. But people have tended to read Plato in terms of postulating types that had some “substance” beyond the typed tokens. Perhaps the confusion can be attributed to a misreading of the ajar-ness or in-progress-ness of a type. New experience will arrive as “typed-tokens.” The type has an “infinity” (non-closed-ness) or “temporal depth.”
Right. Because “mental” is a category, a “type” of entity. Following some other philosophers, we might speculate that “language” is prior to the mental and physical, since these signs “mental” and “physical” depend on one another to signify.
If the physical is supposed to be “truly external” relative to the mental, then the sign “physical” is a sort of “lie” — like the mental realm’s false exit from itself. This is like Kant’s thing-in-itself, which is a sign/concept for us. I think we have something like the subject trying to “model it own ignorance.” As Bakhtin would put it, to be a subject is also to be between or behind that subject, as a language between self and other in dialogue.
Just for clarity, I understand the sound image as the “counting of” a sound ( heard by the ears or imagined) as the sounding of a word. Typically a cat’s meow doesn’t “manifest” as an instance of a word. 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 take indirect realism for granted, then the “exterior” of consciousness-as-stuff becomes “ineffable.” I’m suggesting that identity is “prior” in a logical rather than temporal sense. That all philosophy, operating with categories, swims in ideal unities or categories. But this “ideality” is not intended as mental stuff. Just perceiving a cat as a cat would count for what I mean. The world is “given” in terms of enduring self-identical objects that are nevertheless always changing.
I can understand why one would say this, but I’m not myself coming from a dualist framework. For me, experience is “immediately” world-from-POV.
I agree that “identity” is “subject-relevant.” But I don’t we think we can strip the chair of mental baggage by mentally stripping the chair of mental baggage. It’s like pretending to step outside of one’s own discourse within that discourse.
I’m suggesting that categories (identity, difference, ideality ) are “deeper” than most ontological positions, because they are fundamental. “Fundamental” names another category.
I can find my own sense of the situation in these words. I’d add that we can only speak of difference if we think the same. The “problem” in earlier approaches to this issue was their making of identity a secure and perfectly present substance — as opposed to a temporal synthesis or “gathering.”
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.
I agree here also. Though I suspect that many paradoxes were philosophical pointings. Like Zeno’s paradoxes. They are often presented as if Zeno was a fool, but it makes more sense to read him as offering koans or pointers, enticing others to notice something simple but surprisingly rich and elusive.
I think we can also find this in Ortega and Heidegger. The “flux” of pre-theoretical life is largely “circumspective.” I turn doorknobs and walk around furniture and put my foot on the brake in a way that doesn’t thematize the object as a distinct entity.
It’s interesting that “concept,” etymologically, is together-grasping.
Heidegger wouldn’t treat this as a distinction between conceptual and perceptual, though.
Like I said before, though, consider the dialogical context. We can’t say everything at once, make “all that deserves saying” present here and now.
Just for clarity, I agree. We can read Plato as having been trying to say something more sophisticated. The object is “virtual.” It has no “substance” apart from the “difference” it gathers.