I’m a little surprised that you take me to be trying to solve a problem. From over here, I’m just pointing out what looks to me like a fundamental structural feature of the world. I think this “feature” is obscured by dualistic assumptions that “ideas” are mental stuff. Saussure’s sound-image is great because it’s the signifier and not the signified. To merely hear a singular unrepeatable sound as a repeatable word is basically the entire phenomenon in miniature.
If it helps, I had been reading Derrida and Saussure for years even before I bumped into Plato’s unwritten doctrine. I found it easy to read Plato as offering a fundamental ontology. We could just as easily generalize Saussure’s “sound-image” or Nelson Goodman’s “character.” Different thinkers arriving at the same “seeing” of this ideal or formal component in all things ( including all words.)
Unfortunately, I can’t boast of having read Saussure. But my idea was this: what if, in studying ontology however we choose, we run into the problem of “ineffability” or “indescribability,” which we conceal behind some new concept?
I didn’t mean to reproach you for this. But I was talking about dialectics: whether intentionally or not, this problem appears (in all the ontologies I’ve encountered, and I have it too). For me, this is evidence of irreducibility. I still believe that it’s extremely difficult for any researcher to break free from their own “epistemological pants.”
As for philosophers of different eras and accusations of “shallowness,” I agree with you. Moreover, as I read more and more, I discover that they are all more alike than different. One way or another, they all grasped Sophia (if that’s even possible).
The answer to your question about the relationship between identity and difference will depend on which particular theory of the mind you support. Each particular theory of the mind will come up with a different understanding.
For example, from which particular viewpoint are you looking: Idealism, Indirect Realism, Direct Realism, Phenomenology or Anti-Realism, for example.
I confess, I’m seriously intrigued. Although I’ve grumbled a bit about the “ideal” as a “dialectical patch,” I nonetheless hastily pigeonholed your approach into the compartments of my own “total concepts.”
You truly have a keen intuition, which is, at the very least, intriguing.
Tell me, have you considered the practical consequences of this approach? And how are they radically different from the consequences of classical idealism (where everything less than ideal MUST become so)?
Well, to me your drift is nominalist? In the C20th analytic sense. (Goodman and Quine, at least.)
Reading Plato as a misunderstood nominalist seems a bit of a stretch! But I’ll watch with interest.
Ok, you didn’t say nominalist, but reducing types to (the macro behaviour of) tokens would be that, from the Goodman and Quine point of view. They wanted to avoid reifying abstractions (types, classes, sets, numbers, concepts, ideas, universals), and would tend to cast Plato as chief antagonist?
Then I don’t think there’s any point in even coming to agreement, even in terms, since I conclude almost the exact opposite of your suggestion here, finding these things to be mere mental constructs and not fundamental to anything at all.
I do not think identity, properly construed, obtains. I think “identity over time” can be considered it’s own sort of “truth”. But me 20 minutes is quite literally, not me now, in any sense other than that i remember that guy better than anyone else on Earth.
Right. We are looking for surds as “fundamental ontologists.”
Likewise I tediously emphasize that subjectivity as such is vision at the cost of blindness, or vision in terms of blindness.
Elsewhere I argue that “truth” is a mystification of situated belief — that “true” is best understood as a handy indicator of belief that is always personal. So I don’t pretend to offer truth, nor that the goal is truth. Instead we trade signs, and we are constantly vulnerable to misreading precisely because those signs are between rather than inside us. The bad platonism is the pretense that we can do math with a stable realm of signifieds.
The only ideality that I find in signs (to overstate) is in the iterable “sound image” or signifier. So I just use the word “sign” and tend to avoid the confusion latent in the word “concept.”
I speculate that many of them stumbled upon the same “surd.”
My position is something like a pluralism in the context of radical empiricism. It’s close to the phenomenalism and empiriocriticism of Mill and Mach, respectively. But Wittgenstein calls it “pure realism” in the TLP. Basically I don’t think of consciousness as an internal stuff. I “deny the existence of consciousness.” The best way to read the sign “consciousness” in my view is as the immediate presence and quality of the world itself from the point of view of the conscious organism.
Because it took me a long time to “achieve” this position (a sort of conceptual leap, after moving from indirect realism to direct realism), I don’t think it’s easy to appropriate. But it’s “like” an “insanely direct realism.” On the other hand, the “univocity” of reality is not presupposed more than necessary. The “forum” is presupposed, and we have to share many beliefs to understand one another dimly, but “objective reality” as a crystalline determinate “truth-maker” is “non-sense.” I caution, with a sense of futility, against reading these signs as attempts to “picture something external.” It’s more like I’m pointing at a burning house behind you.
Thanks for saying so ! For me, each of us “has no choice.” I read Heidegger and Gadamer as trying to point to human existence as fundamentally prejudicial comportment or situated revelation of the object. The reason that “being is time” is, I suggest, the “ideality” of every object as “transcendent” or “between us.” In other words, objects as such ( like the signs we offer one another ) have an ineradicable “temporal depth.” The object offers itself in response to my prejudicial taking-as, which I enact blindly, whether I want to or not.
Hence the compact pointing at this situation as “thrown projection.” My own tacit historically-determined projections meet me as the oncoming object. The coming-into-focus of the object (of the text of the other, for instance) is simultaneously a freeing of my projections ( grasped now as mine ) from this object. But the object is never caught nude at its bath like Diana.
Thank you for the kind words !
I think the practical consequences are primarily personal. Life is intensified, made more vivid. The “material” in these wide sense of “qualitative” is given its due as primary rather than secondary. Philosophy is grasped as a life-intensifying “honest poetry” that isn’t “truthful” through this honesty. It is instead “honestly untruthful.”
I come more from the side of German philosophy (including empiriocritism and the logical positivists), though I appreciate many analytic philosophers. I think Ayer’s LTL is great, though it’s (forgivably) still too “metaphysical.” I’m also a big fan of James and Peirce, and I was knee-deep in Rorty’s neopragmatism for a few years.
It is a stretch, perhaps a prank even. But I invite you to try to find Goodman’s “character” approach — generalized to include all objects as equivalences classes of their “manifestations” — in this summary of the “unwritten doctrine.” Of course “the One” is “typing itself” and the “indefinite dyad” is “untyped quality.”
The One and the Indefinite Dyad are the ultimate ground of everything because the realm of Plato’s Forms and the totality of reality derive from their interaction. The whole manifold of sensory phenomena rests in the end on only two factors. Form issues from the One, which is the productive factor; the formless Indefinite Dyad serves as the substrate for the activity of the One. Without such a substrate, the One could produce nothing. All Being rests upon the action of the One upon the Indefinite Dyad. This action sets limits to the formless, gives it Form and particularity, and is therefore also the principle of individuation that brings separate entities into existence. A mixture of both principles underlies all Being.
I read this as us never getting types without tokens or tokens without types. The world is crammed with (typed-)tokens. As far as I can tell, you are the only other person on the forum to “see” the importance of equivalence classes. I think we both see layers and layers and layers of these as the structure of experience/world.
To put it dramatically, we seem to have a “fundamental ontology” — the pointing out of a structure we expect to persist “beneath” other structures as a condition for their possibility.
Sure. Frameworks “control” what shows up as relevant for us.
But I think you neglected my critique of your framework ? If identity is “just mental,” then “external reality” can only be a “mental” X that tries to say “radically ineffable.”
Isn’t the grasping of chess as an object also a move in a practice? Wittgenstein lamented philosophy’s subordination of the particular to the general. When he described forms of life as systems of relations, he didnt mean that the particulars of language games are located WITHIN the larger frame of a form of life. He meant the form of life is enacted in its particulars. To think structural systems as identities is to assume each of the relations which comprise them belong at once to the same whole, rather than as actions or performances which enact a new whole each time.
Wittgenstein argues that particular language games are not united within the identity of an inclusive category of meaning. There is nothing common to all language games or particular applications of a rule. Wittgenstein’s metaphor of “spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre” shows the difference between language use as applications of pre-existing categorical , normative and rule-governed frames and language use as a subtle or not-so-subtle re-invention of the sense of norms, rules and categories.
Family resemblance is the continuous overlapping of fibers altering previous patterns of language use via fresh contexts of use, rather than the churning out of a new instance of a superordinate theme or rule. I think this applies as much to particulars within a language game as it does to the relation between games.
For sure. It would be entirely an obstacle to acknowledge this more than a few times in one’s life. As with ethical work, we expect people to respond to their names. They do. We persevere…But it does have many implications for how we care about ourselves and our ‘identity’ (i.e the image we present).
I enjoy and share in your sense of humor about this situation.
I find this kind of thinking in early Heidegger and Gadamer. I was also strongly influenced by logical positivism and empiriocriticism.
I talk so much about signs lately because it’s a great attack vector on this issue. The blindness of some of the logical positivists was in their taking the “meaning” of signs to be securely present-to-all in terms of a “logic” that lived “above” the empirical world, safe from accidents. So they “blindly” called “nonsense” any signs that they couldn’t make sense of, implicitly in terms of this “true logic” which was “magically” also their personal property to bash others on the snout with.
But if we follow better than they did the vector of their empiricism, we notice that signs are marks and noises in the world. How can I, as a singular organism in the world, trained into a particular habitual comportment toward these signs, pretend to legislate or control or even access from over here the significance of signs for others over there ? I need to assume a residue of “god” to manage this, while trumpeting my atheism.
I am playfully (as an atheist / positivist myself ) attacking my positivist forefathers for still being trapped in the halls of the seminary after all, tangled in the metaphysics they explicitly opposed. Some of them dogged on Heidegger, but he was more genuinely empirical and “positivist” than they were on this crucial issue. They were “deaf” to correction from that direction, insisting instead on an abacus for their oracle.
I’d like to criticize your “false” theory. I’m simply curious to do this, to gain more insight from the encounter.
This morning, as I was walking to work, I noticed a “tired” woman leading her drunken husband somewhere. She did so with care and patience, even though it seems she’s been so fed up with him over the years that a modicum of healthy skepticism or “unbiased assessment” (if she’d taken a sober look at life) would have long ago served as grounds for breaking up with him.
But she patiently carries him along. Either hoping for something, or believing he can be rehabilitated. I don’t know. But then I thought: What if “lies” are evolutionarily more beneficial than the truth in the long run? Yes, classically, we all know: the more you lie to yourself, the worse off you find yourself, and nations that can quickly establish “what really happened” (as close as possible) are more successful.
But look at lovers: isn’t a clouded mind and a subjective attribution of qualities to the object of desire that the object doesn’t possess what leads to procreation?
But let’s go further. What if a sincere belief in the correctness of one’s situational bias is also an important element of this? You say everything is a sign, Adorno is all totalization, Kant is all just a reflection, and the thing-in-itself is transcendent. But this disarms action. (False) belief in one’s own rightness. Agree, this is the driving force?
A great theme in early Nieztsche. To me the sign “truth” is basically vacuous, an indicator of current belief. I was “wrong” before because I believe differently now.
I can come to believe that my former beliefs ( incompatible with my current beliefs) were good beliefs to have at that time anyway.
Maybe some woman didn’t like me yet ( as I currently believe), but I took some meeting of our eyes at the time to suggest that she did. So I approach her, eventually winning her favor. I was “right to be wrong” in retrospect, because I wouldn’t have approached her otherwise.
Well Schopenhauer is dear to me, if you brush off all the Kantian cobwebs. We can add the theory of “Moloch” to my gallows-humor fatalism, which I’d connect to the more golden rather than more strident moments in Nietszche. Cioran is also great.
I don’t believe in “truth,” but I believe in adjusting my comportment towards the world for better results. Feedback loop. Neo-neopragmatism whatnot. I want to pay my bills so I can forget them and write “poetry” (ontology) against the grain of the anxiety of influence. But “not believing in truth” does not at all mean that I don’t seek high sociality. Indeed, monological presuppositions can get in the way of this. I call myself ( with some irony and playfulness and fuckaround) an “ontoperspectivist.” Or an “ontocubist,” which is on the edge of too cute of a name for it. But names matter, phonemes and associations matter. Reckless poesis, the sexophonic forging and fondling of signs, the scrawling of smudged lipstick letters for strangers on toilet tissue, with unforeseen and unforeseeable import…
For the record, I don’t say that everything is a sign, but I think signs are a great “vector” into my weird and yet tradition-reenacting ontopoetic follies.
Disarm action ? I know some people take relativism this way, but let’s flip the situation around. If one is no longer waiting for a message from god, and all action is action from partial blindness, then there’s no problem. You learn through contact with the surprising object.
I indulge in some contextualization:
I have peeked into the ethics threads lately, but I just cannot even feel the itch for some “algorithm” (divine or ideological) that ensures me against the primarily visceral navigation of life’s moral ambiguities. When “God died” for me personally (\approx 18 years old), he died hard but he died real good. I was reading lots of Nietzsche and Freud in my 20s, so my roots are in an intense, ironic cynicism. Eventually I felt the theoretical charm of the problem of “consciousness.” I also love philosophy of science, and I was bothered by a blind spot in “insufficiently scientistic scientism” on the issue of perception and measurement. The early logical positivists and even Popper felt the issue, but the dominant drivel today is just inverted platonism, an ontology stolen from The Matrix. And I went to school for math and love math, but “real” (empirical) computation is “material” and costly.
So how do we make some sense at least out of perception and computation as the basis of empirical science ? We have to consider those monsters in the closest, consciousness and the ideality that haunts even the basic mark, as its repeatability, of the ultra-formalist. But, let it be emphasized, no one needs this stuff. We viscerally enact our trust in technology that reliably does what we want it to. So “foundations” are luxurious toys for people with a taste for banging signs together towards the enjoyment of wondering at surds.
Do you doubt my atheism or my positivism ? My feelings are more hurt ( joking !) if you doubt my atheism. I know that I’m violating the original sense of positivism, but not as much as some may think. If you read Mach, he and I are pretty close on our philosophies of science.