Identity, Difference, Ideality

Metaphysics & Epistemology
101

This is one of my favorite passages from Truth and Method. It is very much on the topic we are discussing.

Thus the historical nature of man essentially implies a fundamental negativity that emerges in the relation between experience and insight. Insight is more than the knowledge of this or that situation. It always involves an escape from something that had deceived us and held us captive. Thus insight always involves an element of self-knowledge and constitutes a necessary side of what we called experience in the proper sense. Insight is something we come to. It too is ultimately part of the vocation of man—i.e., to be discerning and insightful.
…
If we want to quote another witness for this third element in the nature of experience, the best is Aeschylus. He found the formula—or, rather, recognized its metaphysical significance as expressing the inner historicality of experience—of “learning though suffering” (pathei mathos). This phrase does not mean only that we become wise through suffering and that our knowledge of things must first be corrected through deception and undeception.
…
Understood in this way, the formula is probably as old as human experience itself. But Aeschylus means more than this. He refers to the reason why this is so. What a man has to learn through suffering is not this or that particular thing, but insight into the limitations of humanity, into the absoluteness of the barrier that separates man from the divine. It is ultimately a religious insight — the kind of insight that gave birth to Greek tragedy. Thus experience is experience of human finitude.
…
The truly experienced person is one who has taken this to heart, who knows that he is master neither of time nor the future. The experienced man knows that all foresight is limited and all plans uncertain. In him is realized the truth value of experience. If it is characteristic of every phase of the process of experience that the experienced person acquires a new openness to new experiences, this is certainly true of the idea of being perfectly experienced. It does not mean that experience has ceased and a higher form of knowledge is reached (Hegel), but that for the first time experience fully and truly is. In it all dogmatism, which proceeds from the soaring desires of the human heart, reaches an absolute barrier. Experience teaches us to acknowledge the real. The genuine result of experience, then—as of all desire to know—is to know what is. But “what is,” here, is not this or that thing, but “what cannot be destroyed” (Ranke).
…
Real experience is that whereby man becomes aware of his finiteness. In it are discovered the limits of the power and the self-knowledge of his planning reason. The idea that everything can be reversed, that there is always time for everything and that everything somehow returns, proves to be an illusion. Rather, the person who is situated and acts in history continually experiences the fact that nothing returns.

102

No, I haven’t read it. I’m just an illiterate country bumpkin who thinks he can philosophize. On the other hand, this leaves room for genuine surprise at reading something you haven’t read or realizing something you didn’t realize. As you read, this space diminishes (unfortunately, even inventing “lies” is exhaustible, so I listen to this jazz slowly).

However, when philosophizing, I always return to earth, asking questions about praxis: why should a peasant talk about the stars when it’s time to sow? Doesn’t it seem to you that your Onto-Cubism is the philosophy of a “well-fed European” whose bills are paid?

In this regard, don’t you find your approach elitist? Essentially, you offer an excellent tool for a stable life on the ruins of classical metaphysics.

But what if your choice is a step into the unknown, which you must take or die? (a sort of Kierkegaard at its finest) I liked your example of meeting your woman. At that moment, you behaved quite practically, quite open-mindedly, and quite confidently in your assumption.

If I understood correctly, if we take your approach and fully develop it into a coherent system, discarding the positivist prerequisites, then everything will work just fine. Okay. Granted. But there are other people in the world: hungry, uncertain, taking their own, while your approach is paralyzed by a pragmatic choice between two equally valid lies. Don’t you think this approach is a marker of civilization’s decline? Are you sure the barbarians are no longer at the gates?

Yes, I’m getting carried away. Of course, you didn’t propose all this as the truth for everyone. But I have to ask – does it work for you, or is it just a pleasure to examine your own dialectical patches?

103

I’m working class over here in the USA ( part-time adjunct gigs), but no I don’t worry about that sort of thing. I love writers like Veblen, Marx, and Weber. We could get bogged down in talk of the systematic whatnot, but I roughly think that people have to save themselves, mostly because we are mostly deaf to both criticism and advice. A rich person might need more rationalization than this to keep them millions in the vault.

Well my ontocubic flowers aren’t the bone-and-gristle basis. That basis is visceral, like learning to ride a bike with no hands. I’d point at Freud and Jung and others for what can be theorized here. Even comporting myself as “knowing how for others” would feel like a false move to me. Life is “tragic” and “beautiful.”

Eliot nails a special tone in this little known piece. I provide just a sample.

SWEENEY: Well here again that dont apply
But I’ve gotta use words when I talk to you.
But here’s what I was going to say.
He didn’t know if he was alive and the girl was dead
He didn’t know if the girl was alive and he was dead
He didn’t know if they both were alive or both were dead
If he was alive then the milkman wasn’t and the rent-collector wasn’t
And if they were alive then he was dead.
There wasn’t any joint
There wasn’t any joint
For when you’re alone
When you’re alone like he was alone
You’re either or neither
I tell you again it dont apply
Death or life or life or death
Death is life and life is death
I gotta use words when I talk to you
But if you understand or if you dont
That’s nothing to me and nothing to you
We all gotta do what we gotta do
We’re gona sit here and drink this booze
We’re gona sit here and have a tune
We’re gona stay and we’re gona go
And somebody’s gotta pay the rent

DORIS: …I know who

SWEENEY: But that’s nothing to me and nothing to you.

I joked elsewhere that I’m the first man playing as the last man or the last man playing as the first, can’t remember which. But really I’m just some guy fucking around with signs. I want to paint a good painting, tell a good story around the campfire. Because it feels good. It’s a self-justifying activity.

Am I the barbarian at the gate ? Not if you ask the dogs around here (I live with 3 at the moment), because I give them too much ham and too many hugs.

I just don’t have the sense the world much cares at all about my words. The artistic challenge is weaving a text that fascinates through temporal depth, so it helps to rope in other texts via allusion. But I don’t want to be as obscure as Finnegans Wake !

104

Admittedly, these statements seem clearly counterintuitive to the average person. A certain amount of preparation saves me.

A life without any pretensions to greatness always leaves one wondering whether it ever existed. But, on the other hand, you reserve the right to be playful and to deliver your own message, which may touch someone, or it may fly right past them: no coercion or imposition. There’s something deeply relatable to me about this.

Going back to the beginning, I would say that philosophy spoken by a cheerful person is at least more pleasant. More often than not, the opposite happens: a bore tediously develops a tedious narrative. I know a chess teacher who has declared it his mission to create a new approach to teaching, called “joyful chess.”

Ultimately, it’s much more important to be alive in the act itself than to walk around looking smart, as if you’ve mastered the truth and know thousands of quotes from clever books. That’s captivating.

But I think this approach has a downside: it’s fundamentally non-communicable. Remember Mark: “With what measure you mete, it will be measured out to you,” plus “as you sow, so shall you reap.” So, by accepting the fleeting nature of others’ fascination with what you sow, we remain locked in the present moment?

To be completely honest, I don’t mind this outcome. After all, I believe that being is born directly in the act of encounter, for which even a moment is sufficient. Therefore, “sowing,” in this sense, happens naturally. And you don’t necessarily have to convince anyone of anything: other people’s boundaries shift and reassemble simply in the moment of encounter with you.

Perhaps this is just my perspective, but when I open another book, I always think that everything I find there would be nice to pass on—at least to my children…

And returning to God, I’d like to leave a short comment. If we use this concept exclusively as most people have throughout history, then, of course, for many He is dead. Humanity has too often used this word to patch up its epistemic holes: if you don’t know how the world works, say God did it. Convenient. In such a system, God is simply a mental patch. But I am convinced that this is not the only possible hypostasis of God, which is why I continue to remain a believer.

105

In passing, I read and enjoyed some of your posts months ago, on the earlier version of the forum (I was just onlooking at that time). It’s nice to get to really talk with you.

For context, I was a front man for a few crazy experimental rock bands in former decades. We lived the greatness of our music for us as the main thing. I conjure Whitman and Emerson as symbols here. The experience was/is self-validating. It’s noise from the joy of freedom.

My kind of guy ! For me it is indeed about joy, though forums like this sometimes require a mitigated rhetorical aggression. It’s a crazy conceptual jazz where any other maniac can leap on the stage with you.

I agree. Comportment is “deeper.” I love conceptuality, but it’s all nothing without heart. Emerson and Whitman. There’s no magnanimity without a liberation from “idolatry” or “transference.”

I can’t immediately agree on this point. The poet lives to communicate. But the better signs have more temporal depth, so you have to be patient. I see my own “ontocubism” as really just paraphrases of my beloved influences. But there is art enough in paraphrase. Especially given the context of my take on signs and ideality.

Sure. Like every poet, I’d like someone to bother to gather my traces.

For what it’s worth, I think there are high and great conceptions of God. I am an atheist in ordinary terms, but I’ve been fascinated by negative theology, and my own deeper views are pretty close to Feuerbach’s early “atheistic christian mysticism.” These “views” aren’t beliefs about the supernatural. Just more of a sense of life.

Arguing thus, he urges his readers to acknowledge and accept the irreversibility of their individual mortality so that, in doing so, they might come to an awareness of the immortality of their species-essence, and thus to knowledge of their true self, which is not the individual person with whom they are accustomed to identifying themselves. They will then be in a position to recognize that, while “the shell of death is hard, its kernel is sweet” (GTU 205/20), and that the true belief in immortality is

a belief in the infinity of Spirit and in the everlasting youth of humanity, in the inexhaustible love and creative power of Spirit, in its eternally unfolding itself into new individuals out of the womb of its plenitude and granting new beings for the glorification, enjoyment, and contemplation of itself. (GTU 357/137)

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106

Humans are conscious and exist in the world. Human science tells us that the world existed before humans.

Do you think that consciousness existed in the world before humans? Your phrase “immediate presence and quality of the world itself” suggests yes. Your phrase “conscious organism” suggests no.

Therefore, do you believe that i) the world is conscious regardless of the presence of humans, ii) humans are conscious because they are part of a world that is conscious, iii) humans are conscious in a world that is not conscious?

Each person will have a different understanding of identity and difference dependent on their personal belief of a theory of the mind.

107

I addressed this issue ( sort of ) in my thread on “the past.”

Empirical claims, purportedly about the past, are about future perceptions. I don’t think that the past and the future are “symmetrical.”

Counterintuitive, sure, but stubbornly empirical.

The vague idea of “what really happened” isn’t so secure if we pull at the strings.

I allow for the possibility of conscious entities on other worlds who were maybe in the distant neighborhood first. My phenomenalism is explicitly transhuman.

I see consciousness as the being of the world itself, more exactly the being of a streaming aspect of the world. Currently I only take organisms to be conscious, and I’m not sure where I’d draw the line. Is an earthworm conscious ? Is a tree conscious ? I don’t rule it out, but mostly I see more complex animals as conscious. I don’t see the world itself as conscious. So option ||| is closest.

Perhaps. But I’m inclined to see my point as phenomenological. I’m happy if people “see” the phenomenon I am trying to point at, however they might interpret it more globally.

108

@j_j too.

You prompted me to go hunting and I came across this paper. I’ve only read the introduction so far by I’m looking forward to reading the rest of it. If you haven’t already come across it then it may be of interest.

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109

From the viewpoint of phenomenology, I would suggest that identity and difference are aspects of language.

From a phenomenological point of view, what we consciously experience is constantly changing in the sense of Theseus’ ship, meaning that in our conscious experience there can only be differences without identity.

However, as described by Heidegger, language is more than a means of communication but is how we understand the world. (Wikipedia - Martin Heidegger)

A name is constant even though the thing it describes is constantly changing. Because a name is constant, it describes an identity, such as “tree”. Therefore, identities exist in language.

As described by Saussure, words have no inherent meaning, but whose meaning derives from its difference to other words, such that “tree” has meaning because of its relation to “mountain”, for example ( Wikipedia - Ferdinand de Saussure)

IE, from a phenomenological viewpoint, a word describes an identity (Heidegger) and a word gets its meaning from a difference (Saussure).

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110

Great post.

So let us think of names themselves now. We are back to the “ideality” of sound-image. The name “Joe” is never vocalized in the same way twice, but each vocalization “counts as” a vocalization of “Joe.”

I’m inclined to say that we experience an “articulated reality.” Even your claim is presented as an articulation of a “constantly present” form of experience.

Yet I agree that nothing “identical to itself” ever shows up in the exact same way twice. I don’t think “identity” is “mental” or “substantial.” But I continue to try to point at the thing-structure that I take us to “live in.” Even if the thing only is what it is by always being different than it was before.

So I agree with Saussure on the importance of difference for the value or meaning of a sign. But it’s more interesting, IMV, to really consider the sound-image, the signifier. This is supposed to be the “material” or “concrete” part of the sign, but Saussure saw that it is no less "ideal" than “meaning.”

[I]t is impossible for sound alone, a material element, to belong to language. It is only a secondary thing, substance to be put to use. A coin nominally worth five francs may contain less than half its worth of silver. Its value will vary according to the amount stamped upon it and according to its use inside or outside a political boundary. This is even more true of the linguistic signifier, which is not phonic but incorporeal —constituted not by its material substance but by the differences that separate its sound-image from all others.

Elsewhere:

The linguistic sign unites, not a thing and a name, but a concept and a sound-image. The latter is not the material sound, a purely physical thing, but the psychological imprint of the sound, the impression that it makes on our senses.

Finally:

Putting it another way, language is a form and not a substance (see p. 113). This truth could not be overstressed, for all the mistakes in our terminology, all our incorrect ways of naming things that pertain to language, stem from the involuntary supposition that the linguistic phenomenon must have substance.

Saussure’s use of “psychological imprint” needs interpretation here. If you look at the rest of the course material, this “imprint” is like the “counting as” of a sound. It’s what Nelson Goodman calls a “character” in the visual context.

111

Yesterday, we touched on this very briefly and haphazardly. But I’d like to clarify this idea; perhaps we’ll both find it interesting to delve into.

So, we have to go back to the beginning, and even higher.

We’re talking about the difference of a thing in itself and difference as a tool for understanding. And we can’t strictly separate this conversation, since it’s difference we perceive (whatever it may be), but it’s most likely what happens.

Yesterday, I stated something like this: If we discard all theories about the single origin of everything (like the Big Bang), and imagine the origin of existence from different places, then the question of difference resolves itself. After all, in this case, we don’t have to imagine the different as once united. This allows for a certain freedom of thought.

What, then, do we encounter when we look at a thing? We encounter a kind of living recorder that has recorded the transitions of the seed from which it originated (although we can’t always describe it precisely). Let me explain: when I look at a stone, I see not just a boulder, but the history of its formation from something to the state in which I found it. When I look at a person, I see not just a specific individual but the history of their previous formations (including their previous generations). The scars on their face testify to this person’s encounters.

But let’s go further. If we admit that everything around us could have come from different places, then by definition we cannot share a common telos. A stone was created from one source, a person from another; we have different rates of formation, we have different flesh. A stone will become something different in the next moment from its previous self, just as a person does. That is, changes will occur each time they meet, but based on the previous state.

But let’s go even further. Even a common origin from a single source of being does not obligate us to share a common telos. For example, twins born on the same day can live completely different lives, having formed their own goals.

So, when discussing difference, it’s crucial to reject the following premises: 1. A single telos; 2. A single source.

This prevents us from reducing something to a single entity, and it simultaneously criticizes positive dialectic. I’ll elaborate on this a bit.

Let’s say there’s someone named Bauyrzhan and someone named Lucilius. They both come from different backgrounds, live in different countries, have different parents, even going back seven generations; they have different languages ​​and different cultures. What does positive dialectic do to name them? Positive dialectic reduces them to a single entity (based on common characteristics), discarding differences. Positive dialectic resolves antinomy by discarding differences. For example, we could call them by the common name “Men.” But what would remain of Bauyrzhan or Lucilius in this case? But at least we’d have a concept. A concept with which we’ll conduct further operations. At the next stage of dialectic, we can discard the differences (antinomy) between men and women and call them by the general term “people.” We then combine animals and people, leaving us with “organism,” and then we combine this with objects. What remains is “existence.” At this stage, we declare that all “existence” has certain common characteristics.

But consider what has happened (given the above): we have dialectically lumped together diverse things, discarding the differences, and now draw conclusions about everything. So, doesn’t it seem to you that we have made too many cognitive errors and simplifications here, deliberately oversimplifying?

Therefore, I would say that dialectic is a tool that is not without its flaws. We take something irreducible, force it into some higher-level construct, and then assign properties to it.

Thank you, that’s nice to hear. If that’s true, then I’m glad my nonsense is interesting to more than just me =)

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112

I’m with you, and this echoes Walker Percy’s work, which I’ve just discovered.

The sonnet is obscured by the symbolic package which is formulated not by the sonnet itself but by the media through which the sonnet is transmitted, the media which the educators believe for some reason to be transparent. The new textbook, the type, the smell of the page, the classroom, the aluminum windows and the winter sky, the personality of Miss Hawkins-these media which are supposed to transmit the sonnet may only succeed in transmitting themselves. It is only the hardiest and cleverest of students who can salvage the sonnet from this many-tissued package. It is only the rarest student who knows that the sonnet must be salvaged from the package.
…
The dogfish is concealed in the same symbolic package as the sonnet. But the dogfish suffers an additional loss. As a consequence of this double deprivation, the Sarah Lawrence student who scores A in zoology is apt to know very little about a dogfish. She is twice removed from the dogfish, once by the symbolic complex by which the dogfish is concealed, once again by the spoliation of the dogfish by theory which renders it invisible. Through no fault of zoology instructors, it is nevertheless a fact that the zoology laboratory at Sarah Lawrence College is one of the few places in the world where it is all but impossible to see a dogfish. The dogfish, the tree, the seashell, the American Negro, the dream, are rendered invisible by a shift of reality from concrete thing to theory which Whitehead has called the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. It is the mistaking of an idea, a principle, an abstraction, for the real. As a consequence of the shift, the “specimen” is seen as less real than the theory of the specimen. As Kierkegaard said, once a person is seen as a specimen of a race or a species, at that very moment he ceases to be an individual. Then there are no more individuals but only specimens.

The end of this passage is very close to Mill’s analysis of matter in terms of possibility of sensation. The possibilities (which are “ideal”) are taken to be more real than the sensations they seem to package. This is practically justified perhaps, but ontologically questionable.

For me the pointing out of the ideality of categoricity directs us back to quality. The category has no “substance.” The “substance” is qualitatively singular. This is a bit like “the map is not the territory.” Repetition is “fictional” or “ideal.” The sun is new each day.

This is why one can read the question of the meaning of being as the most concrete of all questions. But most will approach the sign “being” as a maximally general and neutral concept. “Ingredient ontology” is ontology approached as the hunt for a primal stuff. The revelation/presence/absence of a plurality of merely ideal kinds of stuff, real only their deep strangeness and overflowing of all category, is overlooked.

I like this theme. It’s the historical depth of the object. This is complementary to (an yet part of) the history that the subject brings to the object.

113

So now let’s move on to time. Humanity as a whole has already figured out quite a bit about how we try to fit it into our cognitive framework in order to “know time.”

But how does “time actually happen”? It’s more complicated. And perhaps the most interesting thing is to compare time with something else, to try to grasp it.

We know more or less reliably that gravity affects time. Physicists roughly say that more seconds pass on the surface of the Earth than during the same time in space. Given a common reference point and the concept of time as successive segments, this appears to be the case. But what if we change our lens? Let’s discard these segments and temporality and look at time as the speed of becoming in relation to one another: in particular, an object related to the Earth can and will change at the same rate as an object related to space. It’s just that the change itself is determined by relation, not by something objective. (As you said, you enjoy honest poetry), so I offer you this perspective.

What if we remove the intermediary (the imaginary timeline)? An object connected to the Earth is in a zone of colossal elastic tension (let’s call it, as physicists do, gravitational pressure). Its flesh, its atoms, its “inner chronicler” are busy maintaining its form under this pressure. Its rate of becoming (change from collision with this specific density of the Earth) is locked in this praxis of connection.

Time, in this view, is the density of praxis. The more connected an object is to a power node (for example, the Earth), the “thicker” and more tightly intertwined is the history of its deformations. Time “occurs” as the pure resistance of the material to its change in the act of connection.

Here’s a poetic quote: “Time flows differently for lovers.”

Within the isolation of lovers’ involvement, the intensity of the exchange of signs, glances, scars, and physical tensions is so intense that the speed of their inner development is completely disconnected from the outside world. They exist in a zone of such “praxis density” that its strength is comparable to the gravity of a black hole. For them, the rest of the universe thins out, its pressure dropping to zero.

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114

Call me a romantic, but I found the last part of that post especially delightful.

Some forms of play even seem to tend toward an unbounded acceleration, a reckless ecstasy.

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115

Don’t take it too seriously: all this is the intuition of a poet who decided that he had taken off his usual lenses =)

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116

I enjoyed it. We should have fun here, experiment.

117

Then let’s take the points I’m proposing and write down:

  1. Time arises in participation, not participation in time.
  2. A thing is not a bearer of properties, but a potential (or template) for differences.
  3. Difference is not a property of things, but something that arises in the act of correlation.
    7. (I want seven numbers, I like it.) Change is the manifestation of new, distinguishable states within a network of connections.

It seems this is no longer jazz, rock, or even punk rock. It’s so self-contradictory that I don’t want to resolve these contradictions, because: You still have to carry chaos within you to be able to give birth to a dancing star.

118

I am tempted to read this in terms of our sharing objects, including signs, in order to perform time together.

I like this too. I might say an “ever-ajar gathering of differences.”

This one is obscure for me.

Speakable change seems to require distinguishable novelty. Perhaps we can poeticize toward a continuum that evades our discrete discourse in terms of ideal categories.

How about verry phree jazz ?

I love this stuff.

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119

Saussure is right about the sign being incorporeal if corporeality is taken to be a substance, but if we understand language in Merleau-Ponty’s sense as embodied intersubjective action, then we move from Sausurre’s sterile, ahistorical structuralist account of the sign as difference to a phenomenological reading of signification as differential practice.

Merleau-Ponty would argue that these differences are not first constituted within an autonomous, synchronic system. They arise through embodied and historically situated practices of expression. Signification is not merely a relation among signs but an achievement of intersubjective action within a lived world.

120

How is change?

This seems to be a cousin to my question, what is a thing, which itself required the preface question, how does a thing come to be a thing?

The following can only be asked of the same exact object:

  1. how is there change?
  2. what is change?
  3. how is there a thing?
  4. what is a thing?

Thing and changing thing are the same thing, or the same change.

This is all flipping the ontological coin of permanence and change, and feeling the epistemological freedom to select what side to call heads and what side to call tails.

Does something permanent ground subsequent change?
Or does change itself beget things as children that, for a time, resist dissolution?

Seems to me we have to play God to even wonder about these things, let alone fashion a hypothesis. But so be it. I do see this question as fundamental.

At this point in history, it seems most have selected change as heads, and have left permanence as a hollow tail to ever surging becoming.

However, by setting change as the priority, it seems to me philosophy and science and truth (like God) are dead, and it is pointless to even allow oneself to feel any satisfaction in any meaningful way when saying anything or reading any words. 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. We get the eternal recurrence of the same amorphous change.

So oddly, the proponents of the primacy and priority of change have built a universe that gives no account for any plurality or manifold of different things. Differences are illusions imposed by epistemological folly.

In a similar way but on the other side of the coin, proponents of unified, identical, system of eternal, ideal substance, give no account for the contingent, particular changing growing many things either.

I’ve found that, the reason for these ontological problems is epistemological and linguistic/logical; we simply don’t allow ourselves to remain ontologists. We are trying to talk ontology, but to do so, we have to talk about what we know of the ontological world. So we are simultaneously invoking epistemology (as we do in any subject - epistemology is ubiquitous for we minded apes). AND we are always distilling this ontological object filtered through our epistemological tools down to its final proof in words and language, so we have raised metaphysical/linguistic issues as well.

It’s a pickle.

Exactly the landscape of the questions of ontology. That is the scenario, or the object, of my four questions listed above.

Me right now, is a different me than me now, now a couple seconds older, so what is “me” in the first place?

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.