No, what I think of is maybe more uneasy than ROSR: not relations as a new substance, but something that won’t offer that comfort at all. What I am pointing at is structural: the unavailability of further ground is not what we are lost in, but what we found.
Groundlessness as missing foundation feels like the fog you describe, but groundlessness as actual structure is what stops the regress without needing something beneath it to do the stopping.
This is a common misreading of Derrida. Difference, the trace, the gramme do not belong to a formal semiotic schema. This is precisely what he is deconstructing. You are confusing him with a structuralist semiotics. He has deconstructed the very notions of form, scheme, metaphysics. The trace is not about communication between people either verbally or via written text. It is not about a system of formal signs. Language is more primordial than this for both Derrida and Heidegger, which is why Heidegger calls language the house of Being.
Well, you wouldn’t be alone in that! They are difficult subjects.
But the question the OP poses is about the nature of time and the relation of time and being. The point I’m pressing is not really that complicated. What is time apart from its measurement or awareness? Physics often presents itself as eliminating every trace of subjectivity in order to arrive at a purely objective description. Yet when cosmologists attempt to describe the universe as a whole, time itself seems to disappear from the equations. Andrei Linde (a major figure in curent cosmology) recognised this:
The problem of including the observer in our description of physical reality arises most insistently when it comes to the subject of quantum cosmology - the application of quantum mechanics to the universe as a whole - because, by definition, ‘the universe’ must include any observers.
Andrei Linde has given a deep reason for why observers enter into quantum cosmology in a fundamental way. It has to do with the nature of time. The passage of time is not absolute; it always involves a change of one physical system relative to another, for example, how many times the hands of the clock go around relative to the rotation of the Earth. When it comes to the Universe as a whole, time looses its meaning, for there is nothing else relative to which the universe may be said to change. This ‘vanishing’ of time for the entire universe becomes very explicit in quantum cosmology, where the time variable simply drops out of the quantum description. It may readily be restored by considering the Universe to be separated into two subsystems: an observer with a clock, and the rest of the Universe.
So the observer plays an absolutely crucial role in this respect. Linde expresses it graphically: ‘thus we see that without introducing an observer, we have a dead universe, which does not evolve in time’, and, ‘we are together, the Universe and us. The moment you say the Universe exists without any observers, I cannot make any sense out of that. I cannot imagine a consistent theory of everything that ignores consciousness…in the absence of observers, our universe is dead’.~ Paul Davies, The Goldilocks Enigma: Why is the Universe Just Right for Life, p 271
Linde spells out more detail in this article.
I mean speaking or inscribing or imagining signs, with a focus on words in this case.
I think we see this in the differently saming way.
Yes, sign is a critical interface between the world and Beings for understanding the world and Being itself.
Due to the system of signs we use, I was able to see the river as the world, time as the water flowing in the river.
“Stepping into the water” was viewed as being born into the world as a Being.
Here questions are arising. Have we stepped into the water out of our own freewill? Or was it a pure chance of accident, which threw us into the water in the river? Or was it divine will which pushed us into the river? The answer for these questions would depend on each Being who is in the river feeling the water flowing. But some of them wouldn’t care whatever the truth was for the reasons and causes on their having stepped into the river. Every Being is different in that sense, having different priorities and dispositions in their own time of being in the world.
As you rightly pointed out, signs offer us a rich radiance, which allows us to interpret and see beyond what we are seeing in the world such as the unborn waiting to step into the river, the dead who departed from the river having been in the water and done their time, and the ghosts which we hear in the winds and rains gushing down into the river at times changing into beautiful sun lights, rainbows and darkness as days go by talking to us in their own signs.
Sort of what I mean by objects are (generalized) signs.
Or signs are objects ( which are always already significant) that have a more “obvious” historicity. Inside/outside, mental/physical, sign/non-sign, …
None of these distinctions are fundamental, for the fundament is the abyss or “open” of differencing. But of course this is no final way of saying what refuses to settle down into an it.
Poor Nietzsche. I recognize Heidegger’s account of technological thinking as standing reserve here. Heidegger tagged the value-positing ubermensch as the self-gathering of subjectivity.
“Through the characterization of value as a point-of-view there results the one consideration that is for Nietzsche’s concept of value essential : as a point-of-view, value is posited at any given time by a seeing and for a seeing. This seeing is of such a kind that it sees inasmuch as it has seen, and that it has seen inasmuch as it has set before itself and thus posited what is sighted, as a particular something. It is only through this positing which is a representing that the point that is necessary for directing the gaze toward something, and that in this way guides the path of sight, becomes the aim in view-i.e., becomes that which matters in all seeing and in all action guided by sight…All being whatever is a putting forward or setting forth.
The preservation of the level of power belonging to the will reached at any given time consists in the will’s surrounding itself with an encircling sphere of that which it can reliably grasp at, each time, as something behind itself, in order on the basis of it to contend for its own security. That encircling sphere bounds off [encloses] the constant reserve of what presences that is immediately at the disposal of the will.
There is truth in this analysis, but perhaps a bit of distortion as well. The vectors of drive and tendency continually competing with each other for temporary supremacy in the will are continually replaced and superseded, not by an absolutely self-gathering ‘I’, but by each other.
I’m glad you read that wild improvisation (see-where-it-goes concept-jazz ), which was written with a Nietzschean irony ! Or from the “continual parabasis” mentioned by De Man in his essay on irony, which analyzes some passages by F. Schlegel.
First, I love the quoted passages. So thank you !
The self-gathering I can be read as a tendency of the “world-stream” itself. A torrent of becoming has a “self-referentiality” through the signs that flash in its rapids.
Right, the river-goer ( who also “is” the river ) lives in the radiance of signs that may radiate a reason or ground, a thrower. The river-goer lives in the radiance of signs. The radiance of these signs depends on and also determines the river-goer as “the river-goer” ( a sign also ) who hears and sees them.
At we first we might say that signs radiate or sing. But their seer or listener is also “only a sign.” Remembering this, and speaking from the non-dual, the word is not “shines” or “sings” but simply “is.”
The river “is.” “Deeper” than “shining” or “ringing” ( less subjectivistic) is the nondual sign “being.”
The river is being its othering waters.
I don’t pretend to a final or authoritative reading of Derrida, but here’s “my” Derrida.
The world itself is metaphorically a text. But this is to say that signs are objects and objects are signs. If you generalize the sign then you get a thing in the world with historical significance.
“There is nothing outside of the text.” This can be read as holism. Signs /objects have a being that cannot be concentrated into a self-sufficient point of independent perfect presence. This does remind me of Hegel’s “no finite thing has genuine being.” As I read Hegel, the “finitude” of an object is its isolation from other objects. I take Hegel to say that every isolated object is “ideal” in the sense of fictional. The only exception to this is the self-creative and progressively self-knowing totality or system of objects, which is “God.”
Have you looked into Derrida/Saussure on the topic of “difference” ?
This seems related to ROSR.
For Saussure, language is a system of difference without positive elements. If we think of the game of Chess, it doesn’t matter how the pieces are shaped in material terms. All that matters is that the relations between the “roles” or “structural positions” are stable.
I agree with you, and I think this is a good way to read Heraclitus also. It’s perhaps Platonic bias (not on your part) to read Heraclitus as suggesting change is more real than permanence. Instead he was pointing out their unity.
“On those stepping into rivers other and other waters flow.”
Here you point out the limit of a metaphor. If we take a snapshot of the visual field of an observer, then the object as given in that field is — in optical terms — an aspect of that object.
What the nondual thinker wants to say is that this “aspect” or “face” is not a mediating picture of the object but a “piece” of the object itself. It is from the character of the succession of these pieces that a “subject” and a “stream of experiences” is “constructed.” We can understand this “subject” to emerge from or as the significance of signs, objects themselves, that are also the unity of their pieces. As I see it, we are constructing subjects and their world-from-POV-streams from different moments/aspects of the same objects.
We can see “aspect” as an unstable transitional metaphor.
At the moment, I think that “moment” is the best metaphor for these pieces of objects that constitute “streams of experience.” These “streams of experience” are “streaming aspects of the world.” But the problem with “aspects” appears again. The point is of course that these “situated streamings” are not streaming pictures of the world but “pieces” of the world itself as the synthesis of all such pieces.
The problem or tension, as I see it and as you point out above, is that we “perform the forum” as time-binding subjects trying to understand one another. I think this is why German idealists wrote of the absolute as a subject-object. Likewise we have “substance that is also subject.”
You are right that Derrida does not reduce his understanding completely to a structuralist schema. However, Derrida’s deconstruction is still an endless process within a system of signs, even if he understands “sign” in a much broader sense.
For Derrida, language is the foundation on which thinking and being are built. With Heidegger it is different: we first find ourselves already in the world and in a concrete situation. Language is an important ontological layer, but not the primary foundation in the same sense. It is rather the place where Being is disclosed.
For Derrida, différance is no longer simply a theme, but something like a quasi-mechanism or operation of thought. He criticizes Hegel, but not necessarily the whole direction of Hegelian thinking. Rather, he criticizes its ontological form. In Hegel, self-negation becomes a movement forward or upward, toward self-disclosure and sublation. In Derrida, différance is something like an analogue of self-negation, but without final reconciliation: it produces an endless, shimmering network of self-differences.
With Heidegger it is different. Being is disclosed through language, but language here is not primarily a system of signs. It is closer to a layer of manifestation, especially in the thinking of the poet. I am not sure Heidegger could accept Derrida’s treatment of binary oppositions, because he might see this as still belonging to metaphysical thinking. Derrida, on the one hand, rejects the idea of the world as self-movement through the unfolding of contradiction; on the other hand, he finds asymmetry within language and textuality. But if, for Heidegger, the world is disclosed through language, then this asymmetry would have to belong somehow to the disclosure of Being itself. Derrida seems to deny precisely this move, since he does not want to ground the play of differences in Being.
Thanks for the link to a very interesting paper.
“The book of nature is written in the language of mathematics goes” wrote Galileo. A very useful recognition, since it permits us to focus on the measurable and intersubjective aspects of the world in order to further our ability to create useful explanations and to make useful predictions. But that utility comes at a cost – it excludes the non-mathematizable aspects and sets up an operational dualism.
Descartes took Galileo’s operational distinction and turned it into metaphysics with his substance dualism. Then Locke took made the epistemological adaptation of Descartes’ ontology by dividing qualities into primary qualities (mathematizable and inter-subjective) and secondary qualities (subjective and non-mathematizable).
I think it was in these developments that the trap was sprung. Once we separate out the mathematizable in the name of utility, we inevitably sacrifice the most fundamental aspect of experience – things change. Bergson understood this. So it doesn’t surprise me that this route culminates in the Wheeler-DeWitt Equation.
These developments, for all their utility, leave two unaddressed issues for me: how can the changing emerge in a world model from which it has been excluded at the outset? And how does qualitative subjective experience emerge in a world model from which it has been excluded at the outset?
This reminds me of Lord Kelvin’s comment in 1900 that “The beauty and clearness of the dynamical theory, which asserts heat and light to be modes of motion, is at present obscured by two clouds.” The first of these was the result of the Michelson-Morley experiment, which foreshadowed relativity theory. The second was the equipartition problem, which foreshadowed the quantum theory. And the problem now is that of reconciling these two profound developments.
Sorry for the long intro but this bears directly on your question:
I have to admit that I don’t understand how the word ‘or’ is functioning here (and wonder if it is a typo – maybe ‘of’?), but there you have it – measurement and experience (awareness). The one became two, and the separation obscured the view of the way back to the one.
It seems like the scientific enterprise seeks simplicity in unity, forever digging beneath multiplicity in its attempts to discover that unity. Mendeleev simplified and unified with his invention of the periodic table of elements. But each step of this process introduces new complexity and the game starts again. Thompson’s discovery of the electron and Rutherford’s discovery of the nucleus again simplified and unified, which exploded into the “particle zoo.” The latest episode is the quest for a Theory of Everything, the unification of gravity with the (already) “Grand Unified Theory.” And so to Loop Quantum Gravity.
All the time digging, whilst turning a blind eye to the problem of change and the problem of experience. Whitehead took the problem of experience seriously, but still seems to fail to address the problem of change. Rovelli addressed the problem of time (the directionality inherent in processes), but still seems to fail to address the problem of change itself.
I suspect that these ‘problems’ are a symptom of the bifurcation I described earlier, and that they won’t be resolved by more digging but only by a retreat out of the hole.
This is from Gerson’s book on Platonism.
An antinominalist could insist on the reality of the phenomenon of sameness in difference and yet deny that there is an explanation for this, claiming rather that it is just a brute fact.
But what Parmenides actually takes Socrates to be maintaining is not that the many are self-identical in a way that contradicts their numerical and qualitative distinctness, but that despite their ‘manyness’ they are in a way one, that is, that there is a self-identical ‘idea’ or character that can be predicated of each. We may leave aside for the moment the further inference that only if there is a Form ‘over and above’ or separate from these can this be possible. Here we need to consider the cognitive act of ‘seeing’ a self-identical unity within or among a many. For Plato, this ‘seeing’ is the essence of human cognition.
The river is the “sameness in difference” of its waters. The river, as river, is the ἰδέα that “collects” these differing waters so that they are a river. Or, more carefully, the ἰδέα points to the “collectedness” that is there in each “water” itself. The instantaneous water is “immediately” there as “the river.” We can, however, phenomenologically isolate the instantaneous “water” as a new “transcendent” entity.
This shift in “conceptual focus” is so easy for us that it can even confuse us. We constantly create new “intentional objects” by trading signs. We swim in articulation as fish swim in water, which explains a tendency to dismiss as superstition the very “ideality” we live in and largely as.
I see this seeing as indeed “the essence of human cognition.” I expect that non-human animals also experience the world as articulated, but in our case it is especially through signs that are “arbitrary” in Saussure’s sense. Systems with “arbitrary” signs are “systems of differences without positive elements.” In fact, they have positive elements, but those elements are arbitrary, like the shapes of Chess pieces. A structuralist X-ray of Chess gives the essence of Chess in terms of pure relationship. But this is a limit point never achieved, for discussing the structure requires some minimal inscription of its “almost purified” elements.
For nondual thought, this is instead the essence of the world itself. The world itself is fundamentally articulated, as one of its two deepest opposed/complementary principles.
Yes, I want to connect Plato’s “unwritten doctrine” to Heraclitus here.
Gerson also give us this, which points at how the river “feels” to us, what “overflows” or “fills” the mere collectedness or categorizedness (the ἰδέα) of the-water-now.
The nonintelligible aspect of reality includes the receptacle (υποδοχη´) and sensible qualities. The former, which is described as having the characteristics of both extension and unqualified matter, is only cognizable by a sort of bastard reasoning (λογισμω˛˜ νοθω ´ ˛ ).The latter are (in part) the basis for the beliefs that we have of the sensible world. The reason we are able to have such cognition as belief at all about sensibles is that these are images of the intelligibles imposed by the Demiurge; only these intelligibles are the objects of intellection (νοησις ´ ). Presumably, it is possible to have beliefs about sensibles as such, for example, that fire is hot or that water is wet. But if by ‘hot’ or ‘wet’ we mean to refer to the phenomenological aspect of the experience of fire or water, we are not referring to anything that is, strictly speaking, intelligible.
Less important theoretically, but fascinating for speculation, Gerson also gives us a famous excerpt from a letter by Plato:
To anyone who has followed this discourse and digression it will be clear that if Dionysius or anyone else—whether more or less able than he—has written concerning the first and highest principles of nature, he has not properly heard or understood anything of what he has written about; otherwise he would have respected these principles as I do, and would not have dared to give them this discordant and unseemly publicity. Nor can he have written them down for the sake of remembrance [υ‛πομνημα´των]; for there is no danger of their being forgotten if the soul has once grasped them, since they are contained in the briefest of formulas.
This bolded final sentence suggests that it’s coherent to “creatively misread” Plato as having a very simple doctrine that is also very rich. Much of the conversation about Heidegger here is aimed at the tension between the discrete and the continuous. Thinking the world in terms of objects “forgets” their dark background or the soup in which they float. Thinking in terms of a pure conceptuality, stripped of emotion and feeling, moves us toward formal logic and the scientific image. Some philosophers prioritize ideality and presence, while others (un-)focus on the darkness from which these emerge. One aspect of this darkness is of course sensation and emotion as “in themselves” ineffable. Another aspect of this darkness is temporal and spatial. What is not here now in any way at all ? Or what is only arriving or departing ?
How does this connect to being and time ? The being has temporal depth because it is a “collection” of its moments. The very being of the being, its unity as a being, as a collection of differing moments, is pointed at by the word ἰδέα.
But this word ἰδέα has synonyms. Other pointers “do the same thing.” Nelson Goodman uses “character.” In Goodman’s terms, we might say that reality is fundamentally “characterized.” In other words, it is populated by entities that are entities precisely through their “temporal depth.”
Perhaps I might have said ‘measurement, or, for that matter, awareness’. Because they are different - plainly measuring time with a device is different to simply being aware of its passing. And again, in the absence of an awareness that is able to sense the duration between points of time — in what sense would time exist? Hence my argument that it has an ineliminably subjective element.
I’m completely on board with your description of ‘the great abstraction’, in fact it surprises me how little awareness of it or commentary about it there is. It does, of course, tie directly into Whitehead and also Husserl — the substance of the book The Blind Spot, by Evan Thompson et el.
As for Henri Bergson — he distinguishes two fundamentally different conceptions of time. What physics measures and represents, Bergson argues, is not time as lived, but a spatialised substitute for it: a series of discrete instants laid out along a line. This quantitative, homogeneous “time” is indispensable for calculation and prediction, but it is not time as it is actually experienced.
I can’t see it. Gerson’s description of eidos is exactly as I’ve come to understand it via another text on Platonism, Eric S Perl Thinking Being. But how much does Plato really dwell on time or temporality? It seems to me that the basic distinction he’s always elucidating is between being (that which is) and becoming (that which comes to be and passes away.) I don’t know how much he has to say in the nature of time, though.
Yes I can make sense of that now.
I’m quite enamored with the way that @j_j describes it as ‘presence.’ I interpret this as simply the being of (or existence of, though I prefer the former) the pre-dual ‘given’ within which the bifurcation takes place. And that bifurcation is grounded in the fact that the ‘given’ is changing, and furthermore, that it is perspectival in a way that reveals itself to be one face of a community or a society. A node in a network… and this is where I start digging in a different direction, but still digging. Always digging.