I agree, but you present this to me as if it’s not what I’ve been saying all along.
Note that I have used my own words to paraphrase my influences. That way the focus on on the issues themselves. As I see it, we quote passages that we endorse to credit our influences and to help others find great philosophers. But finally we take personal responsibility as genuine researchers.
As I have indicated above, I think you and Wayfarer are being a little sloppy here and conflating consciousness/being with the empirical subject associated with that consciousness.
The empirical subject is hugely important and deeply historical. The way that spoken sentences are “there” is intensely functionally related to the history of the empirical subject that they are there for.
So I’d say that thinkers have to decide whether or not they are going to reify consciousness.
Of course for many it’s just a wild claim that “consciousness is best understood as the being of the world.” Unless a person feels/grasps the ontological difference intensely, this can only sound like a reckless idealism.
Wayfarer is flirting with a pre-Kantian idealist subjectivity, I’m pointing to a post-realist notion of world as self-producing rather appearing before perspectival subjects, and I take you to occupy a post-Hegelian pragmatist middle ground.
Wayfarer runs the risk of reifying consciousness, while from a Heideggerian or Derridean or Foucaultian point of view you run the risk of reifying the empirical. The approaches to Being, consciousness and discourse that the above authors unfold dodge both dangers.
As I said before, I read your use of the term ‘ontological difference’ to deviate significantly from Heidegger’s in a direction that fails to see how the concept for him refers to Being as a making or ground laying. The world worlds. It doesnt do this by itself. Rocks dont have world and animals are poor in world. Only human Daseins have time, history, and world, because the ontological difference is the clearing where man and world constitute each other through their engagement, which continually produces both the self and the world anew.
“World exists—that is, it is—only if Dasein exists, only if there is Dasein. Only if world is there, if Dasein exists as being-in-the-world, is there understanding of being, and only if this understanding exists are intraworldly beings unveiled as extant and handy. World-understanding as Dasein-understanding is self-understanding. Self and world belong together in the single entity, the Dasein. Self and world are not two beings, like subject and object, or like I and thou, but self and world are the basic determination of the Dasein itself in the unity of the structure of being-in-the-world.
This seems like a form of dualism. The world worlds to be sure, but we are not separate from the world and its worlding. Is Dasein for animals too? It seems to me that Dasein is a special case of the world’s worlding, just as the Unwelts of other animals are. To be sure there appears to be local separation, but on the global scale it seems fair to say there is no separation at all. Rocks are part of the world’s worlding as is perception of rocks, both animal and human. It seems to me to be a world of plurality, lacking any real separation. Separation is conceptual. You run the risk of reifying separation, or so it seems to me.
Yes, I think Wayfarer tends toward a Kantian/Schopenhaurian dualism. He can speak for himself, of course, but that’s the blurry reading that I’m getting from over here.
I basically agree with @Andy 's take on Wheeler, with the world as a “self-excited circuit.”
I don’t mean to make phenomenal streams into an “absolute” structure. But they are an important structure, deeply embedded in the forum that grounds conversation. Because I write to be understood by those “on the outside” of this general framework, I’m not inclined to emphasize the most general and difficult expression of what is arguably an object splintered ontology.
I try to stress that “from-a-point-of-view-ness” is there in the manifested object itself. The coin appears optically as heads or tails, not both at once. This oversimplification is a pointer.
I’m not afraid to say there are things in the world. I’d also emphasize that the world doesn’t show itself as a crystalline system of objects. The doorknob is something I turn on the way out of the room. I tend to “look right through” the letters to their “significance,” and so on.
I’m familiar that many understand the OD in terms of being as world or receding contexture. That’s a valid use, but I’m not a prisoner of the seminary, condemned to quote scripture in order to sneak in my own beliefs as the “true” meaning of this or that father.
In my “research project” (a philosophy that I take personal responsibility for), it’s more important to avoid the reification of consciousness. So I don’t treat the O.D. as something branded by Heidegger. ( I suspect that many of us have been shocked by the mere “presence” of the world. )
I quote Wittgenstein, Sartre, and Fasching, for instance, to emphasize the ontological difference that is relevant to what I am presenting and defending as my own belief.
Just for clarity:
I’m well aware of the ‘problem of reification’ and don’t consider myself to be guilty of that. My considered view is nearer to that of objective idealism i.e. formal ideas are structures in reality that transcend individual minds but can only be grasped by intellectual intuition.
What I understand by formal ideas or universals is not entities subsisting in a separate realm, independently of any mind. That would indeed invite the charge of reification — hypostatising abstractions into kinds of ghosts. I don’t think that formal ideas exist apart from acts of understanding, but when they are understood, what is grasped exhibits a necessity that the act of grasping does not itself confer. The Pythagorean Theorem doesn’t exist, except for in an intellectual sense, but when it is grasped something real is understood. That is what grounds logical necessity. That necessity isn’t the product of my mind, and it isn’t the physical triangle. It shows up in the act of understanding, but isn’t produced by it.
Isn’t that close to what Husserl means by categorial intuition? As I understand it, he ideality of the content doesn’t imply a Platonic realm, just the recognition that what’s grasped has features the grasping act itself lacks. And it’s arguably closer to Aristotle than to the caricature of Plato — universals aren’t separately existing entities but neither are they mere psychological abstractions, products of the individual mind. They’re grasped in and through particular instances, but what’s grasped transcends any particular instance. (Which of can probably be traced back to Brentano’s absorption of Aristotle?)
So we see the world through those ideas as structures in cognition, the rules of inference that govern thought. But ‘the rules’ don’t exist in any objective sense - they transcend existence.
Sure. I’m aware of that. But I’m saying that the “transcendental subject” is still very much reified, a thing. This “transcendental subject” is the major topic of Braver’s A Thing of This World. He generalizes the idea as an ICS, impersonal conceptual scheme.
As I understand your position, you posit a faculty that recognizes mathematical truth. An “eye” that “sees essences.” Typically this involes as dualistic notion of the sign as vessel and content, signifier and signified. Meaning is inside us and not “out there” in the world.
But post-Kantian thinkers like Hegel and Heidegger “break open the self into the world.” Dualism is cancelled. But at the cost of dropping the myth that this world is fallen. I find much of their work convincing, and also more “true” to life as it is lived.
We are in this world, but we do not belong here. We yearn for a reality that is real, and a truth that is true. Since these are not to be found among the detritus of everyday life, we must seek it in a world beyond or behind this one, a realm that truly exists because it has no whif of non-existence about it—no destruction, no imperfections, no suffering, no death. Our duty in this life is to escape this life, to withdraw physically, emotionally, intellectually, spiritually from these shadows, to slip the bonds that hold us—to escape. And philosophy is what shows us our goal and guides us to it. We are born into a particular place, a particular culture, body, appetites, but these are not who we really are. Like King Arthur, we are of royal blood hidden in a commoner’s house, or like Harry Potter we are really a wizard in muggle’s clothing. In philosophy, our true self is reason. When we think, we turn away from bodily pleasures and distractions to pure intellectual contemplation, from the contingent to the essential, from the shadows of the cave to the reality waiting outside. Meditating on these maters lets us join ourselves to that realm, aligning us with reality instead of illusion, truth instead of opinion. In doing so, we become like them and, just a little bit, we become them.
…
This was, with a few notable exceptions, the dominant conception of philosophy, reason, and reality for two millennia. This is the story that centuries of metaphysicians were weaned on. Even the word metaphysics, regardless of its particular origin, captures the idea: the discipline that studies the reality that is beyond or meta this changing, empirical physis. Now I don’t want to lay the blame at the feet of any one individual, but it is all Plato’s fault. It was Plato who wrote what is surely the greatest story ever told, which has survived many transformations and reincarnations with the main features intact. We can see its outlines in much of Christian philosophy, for which we are children of God who have fallen into a world of sin and corruption. It survives in Descartes’ laying of the foundations of science on a Platonic distrust of the senses and the vague information they give. Methodological doubt is his way out of the cave by revealing the mathematical properties that are true because they do not vary among perceivers or across time. The lesson of these meta-physicians is that we must not settle for the world we see around us, but must ever strive to transcend it, for the sake of our minds and our souls.
Discussing Hegel and then Heidegger, Braver adds
If a noumenal reality is something we can in principle never have access to, not even just to think it, then the meaning of phenomena changes. Without the contrast of an in-itself, qualifying experience as for-us loses the meaning it had when it served as a contrasting term, as Nietzsche famously concludes: “the true world—we have abolished. What world has remained? The apparent one perhaps? But no! With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one.”
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On the traditional metaphysical scheme, we must settle for doxa and physis, second-rate truth and reality, because that’s all we can get. But if we leave behind the conceptual framework that made that contrast meaningful, then we no longer have to make apologies for the world we’re in contact with and the views we cobble together. This idea is what I called Continental Anti-Realism in my first book, A Thing of his World —it takes the “meta” out of “metaphysics.”
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I see this Continental Anti-Realism reaching its zenith with Heidegger. He understands being to mean the presentation of something to us, with both “presentation” and “something” understood very broadly. There are many different kinds of things and they can present themselves to us in many different ways or, to put it another way, being is said in many ways.
…
Nevertheless, things must come into the clearing for us to discuss them and assign them any kind of meaning at all, including just the fact that they are. This undermines Kant’s distinction between appearance and reality: It is phenomenologically absurd to speak of the phenomenon as if it were something behind which there would be something else of which it would be a phenomenon…One cannot ask for something behind the phenomenon at all, since what the phenomenon gives is precisely that something in itself.
Phenomena are what are; the way we experience the world is the way it is. This is why Heidegger identifies phenomenology, the study of our experience of the world, with ontology, the study of the world as it is, indeed, we can go ahead and say as it is in-itself. The notion of a reality beyond this one has been rejected, so its effect of demoting our experience to “mere” appearance has been disarmed. Merleau-Ponty makes the point nicely when he says, “we must not, therefore, wonder whether we really perceive a world, we must instead say: the world is what we perceive.”
The unstable, evolving-drifting “transcendental subject” is “performed” or “enacted” in the sensory-affective world. The world worlds significantly and self-referentially.
I basically agree with you, but I prefer to jettison the reference to “mind” that suggests that the world is “inside” subjects.
It’s because I grasp the river as also for others and also beyond this moment that the “idea” of the river is its “transcendence.” “Dasein is transcendence.” Dasein is disclosure of world. But this disclosure is perspectival, and this “from-a-point-of-view-ness” has been misread, I suggest, in terms of an interior.
Consciousness is, for instance, the being or presence of signs in the world, and these signs have a “significance.” “Meaning” ( significance) is the fundamental “character” of the world.
I’ll chew over all that. I like the Braver essay, found it quite digestible (now listening to a podcast).
Strictly speaking, the now doesn’t exist. When we say “the now”, it is already the past. What we are seeing and here “the now” comes from our immediate memory of the past. Hence “the now” is an illusion.
I agree with Gadamer saying “Being is time.” Because of the foundation of Being is time, Being is temporal existence in the world. Because Being is time, it has its past, and is becoming. Becoming is the now, which is moving toward the future, and when peered into and experienced by the Being, is already “the past”.
I recall Heidegger’s idiom “Auf dem weg sein” for meaning existence on the road, or “be on their way” constantly heading towards its future from the past, whose the now is becoming, and that is the fate of Being.
Does “transcendence” happen by the objects? Or do you have to actively and wilfully transcend yourself the objects for the endurance ?
I’m sorry you find it that way.
When I first looked at the unwritten doctrine, I was shocked at how immediately intelligible it was for me. Findlay goes in another direction. Others still in others. But a fair number do try to understand Plato in terms of a fundamental doctrine.
In Gadamer’s terms, my initial projection was surprisingly stable. I had been thinking for years about the work of Saussure and Derrida, and Plato’s unwritten doctrine strangely “leaped ahead” to fit in perfectly with much later, presumably more advanced thinkers.
When I cracked open my yellowed paper-back of Timaeus, I happened upon the passage in the OP. This too was immediately intelligible in terms of the unwritten doctrine. It’s fun to speculate about authorial intention, but I don’t feel constrained by it. Nor would I pretend that my freely-offered interpretation gives the “true” reading of something so suggestive and open. I share what I take to be a coherent reading that maybe one or two people out there will be able to hear it and twist it into what they think is the best shape.
I speculate that you are borrowing your version of the now from physics. Consider, as you read this very sentence, the way that you anticipate in terms of what you remember.
In physics, we get the punctiform now, which is basically a real number. The “instantaneous” velocity at time t is \frac{p(t +h) - p(t)}{h} as h \to 0. Yet the arrow flies, and the sentence signifies.
I will grant that the now is always “dying” and yet also always “being born.”
But our perception is not able to catch the birth of the absolute now due to the time lag between the moment of the birth and our perception in strict sense. 
I am sure some psychologist did experiment on calculating the time lag, and came up with some micro seconds, when “the image of the now” reaches our brain, and the actual the now. I still have the article somewhere in the house.
Yes. I’m with you. The flow of existence. Being is time is becoming is process or revelation. What does it mean to see my neighbor’s dog “again” ? The again-ness of my neighbor’s dog is here now. There’s that book that that crazy girl handed me on campus once. This is the shirt I’ll wear to the party this weekend.
I like that. We hurtle into the future. Or sometimes drift. Like Kerouac’s On The Road.
Personally I don’t accept the “absolute now” as more than a mathematical abstraction. I see such abstractions as useful for making technology that “lives in time with me.”
Great question ! When I first heard people use “transcendence” in a phenomenological context, I though it was something spiritual. But really it’s just the object’s being “more than me” and “more than right now.”
Immanent means “inside” and transcendent means “goes beyond” or “outside.” Objects like fire hydrants are “transcendent” simply because I experience the fire hydrant as existing also for others, as being a thing that is not reducible to any passing seeing of it. The fire hydrant as object has a “unity” that I take granted when I discuss it with others.
—You know that old yellow fire hydrant in front of my place ?
—Yeah, I’ve seen it.
We are discussing the same fire-hydrant, but our perceptions of it were not the same, are not the same, will not be the same. Those perceptions are “unified” as perceptions of the same shared interpersonal fire-hydrant.
I claim that this “unity” is what Plato means by “idea.” The “one” in his unwritten doctrine is the principle of form or identity. But the fire-hydrant has color and hardness and so on. Not just concepts of color. But actual color, the feel of cold metal on my hand. That IMO is the dyad’s contribution. So objects are transcendent interpersonal logical unities of sensory-affective “pre-stuff.”
Crucially, that fire-hydrant is not finished showing itself. It remains as the possibility of its further revelation. Its future is real but unwritten in the sense of the future as oncoming indeterminate possibility. Reality itself as never-finished-process continues on its merry way. The world worlds.
I don’t accept math abstraction in most cases. Because they can be too abstract.
But it is not just the time lag of perceiving the now. It is also we humans don’t realise it is “the now” they are perceiving until we tell ourselves, “It is the now I am perceiving.”
That judgment process and telling or writing in linguistic expression can take a few seconds, which is far later than just a few micro seconds reaching to 0 seconds. That is quite long past the actual now.
OK, but now I want to question the 3rd-person point of view. Who is holding the stop-watch ?
I agree it takes a certain amount of “physics time” to voice the now.
Consider 100m racers in the Olympic running the track with the other competitors. The running race gets recorded by the high resolution camera with highly accurate stopwatch.
If the 2 racer has arrived and hit the line almost at the same moment, but if the runner1’s toe or finger crossed the line by 0.001 second earlier than the runner2, the runner1 will get the gold medal, and the runner2 will get the silver.
It might be almost no difference in time at the finishing moment, but the runner1 still have arrived earlier than the competitor, and the competitor has arrived in “the past” after the runner1’s arrival.
Human eyes cannot detect that sort of time difference in the live actions performed in high speed, but high resolution cameras with highly accurate stopwatch can capture the moment, and can be replayed.
The highly immediate past to the now, which almost looks and feels like the now, still belongs to the past exists.
It also tells how the bare human perception could be lacking and illusive, hence the reason why Plato said the material world and sense perception is fake? The reality is in the world of ideas and forms?
I think many would see it that way, and I think many would contrast the eternal intuitive truth of pure geometry or number theory to any empirical claim. Ayer convincingly argues that no empirical claim is beyond revision. To suggest that it is beyond revision is to make it a definition — to make it into an axiom.
My view is that “ideas” gather up “sensations” into things we can talk about. So it is everyday reality, in all its ambiguity, that is explained by ideas “giving objects their speakable enduring identities.”
To speak of things at all “requires” these “ideas.”