Great post.
Yes. I agree with Heidegger here if we generalize the situation to sentience, perhaps with a focus on sapient sentience.
The second is what I call ‘the outside view’ - as if you are looking at yourself from a third-person perspective. Which in reality can’t really be done.
I agree. I might phrase the last point in terms of our necessary embodiment in a world.
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Can you elaborate ? Is this like the duck/rabbit ?
Thank you. Can you elaborate on what “eternal” means for you here ?
I like your clear direct English. This feels like a nice fusion of some classic ideas into a fresh piece of poetry/insight.
I think of Feuerbach when I read that last part. He might say that we see our dying selves in all other people. We are assembled from mostly the same fragments of being.
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It’s an old bugbear of mine. Kant’s physics was wrong. Folk define change as only occurring in time, then act surprised when time turns out to be defined by change. They are arguing in a circle.
Time is better thought of as a dimension, like breadth, height an width; and so dropping the supposed link from time to change to being.
A-series and B-series time are a difference in perspective, not ontology.
A bunch of issues dissolved again by getting the grammar right.
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Cratylus, according to Aristotle, “criticised Heraclitus for saying that it is impossible to step twice into the same river; for he thought one could not do it even once”.
Sounds right. Except that we now understand how to define a function at a point. So it can remain a river, even as it changes.
The assumption was wrong, not the river.
The question that occurs to me here is ‘To whom or what must it show its face in order to change?’. By “show its face” I’m presuming you mean interact with" or “have an effect on” or “forma relationship with”.
It is said that things are changing all the time―at different rates of course―so, if that is true, then perhaps ‘becoming’ is a more appropriate term than ‘being’, but being will do if we take it to refer to something in its temporal entirety.
If something “shows its face” to something and then to something else, the face shown may not be the same of course. Is the being that shows the different faces to different things the same being? I think we could say ‘yeas’ or ‘no’ depending on what is meant by ‘same’ and ‘being’.
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“Becoming” has a tone of not quite being there yet… Which is not always right.
The italicises part presumes “yes”.
I wonder if there is a “there” to a thing apart from our identifications of it or the determinate relations it has with, or effects it has on, other things.
True if ‘being’ is interpreted as referring to the whole process of a things temporal existence. On the other hand I once had the being of a child, and now I have the being of an old man. Are these the same beings? I’d say it can coherently be said that I am both the same and a different person now than I was when a child.
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FWIW, I love how well to express yourself with these concrete examples in a clear, friendly language.
If the world-face were frozen, would there be an “I” who sees it ? Is that a fair translation ?
I’d say no. Selfhood lives in signs ? Curious what others will say.
FWIW, sounds not so far from Heidegger in a much friendlier language.
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Do you mean that if you are identified with or as your visual field then the keyboard is as much a part of you as your hands?
I like the way you put that. Plato’s Republic speaks of “actual” (empirical) things as between being and nonbeing.
We might say that the object has “most” of its being elsewhere, just as the moon has a dark side.
How might we understand Jung’s archetype ? It is not other than its instantiations, but no instantiation is the archetype ( makes it fully present). Joyce’s method in FW is explosively archetypal, not just in terms of personalities but at the level of language, on at several levels within language. It is a fractal. He mentioned The Book of Kells in a letter.
In every drop of ocean the entire ocean. Leibniz is profound in the monadology. He thinks you can zoom in on reality forever and ever without loss of further detail. Infinitesimals have their own hyper-infinitesimals have their hyper-hyper-infinitesimals, and so on. The tiny creatures seen in a microscope have equally intricate organisms that are microscopic relative to them.
Feuerbach uses this structure when discussing the human species. Or really any biological species. No human is the human species ( “the species essence” ) but the human species is not other than finite, mortal human beings. A potential infinity of unborn human beings “live vaguely” in the darkness of the future, so the “species essence” has an infinitude as futural.
Perhaps we can read concealment in terms of self-negation or the reverse. We might say that Being — which is Time — discloses by always also concealing. Time gives us “facades” or “sides” of entities. Time gives us the light and the darkness of the entity at once, the positive and the negative of the entity at once. At once suggests “moment.” The moment of the entity is simultaneously its being and non-being, or rather its “fused” presence and absence. What is present and what is absent is “one” or profoundly entangled. In everyday terms, I see this side of the spatial object and the not-seen object is determined — vaguely — by the exclusion of what is seen.
This is especially relevant for me. Being “is” time. Knowledge depends on signs between us and therefore as absent as they are present in any single showing. So being as presence-absence is time.
My take is the the sign “consciousness” is best understood as an attempt to say this “time/being,” this presencing/absencing of world. As we have discussed elsewhere, the temptation is to read the nouns as a pointer to substance, to a stuff. But rather we want to point at the “given-ness” or arrival/departure of stuff.
I’m definitely sensitive, like you, to unseen circles. One of the reasons I object to mainstream real numbers is the impredicativity in the completeness axiom.
Every nonempty set A of real numbers which is bounded above has a least upper bound.
This is part of the implicit definition of real numbers, which refers to the very real numbers that it is supposed to help define. Indeed, this crucial axiom is what gives us the leap from the rational numbers to the real numbers.
But away from such formal intentions, we have the hermeneutic circle. If signs are empirical objects with historically “established” significance at the level of the perceiver, then the outward ( or inward ) spiral involved can be more than a failed formalism.
In my view, philosophy just isn’t like math. Language isn’t a formal system. And yet I recognize that we often work toward an agreement about how to use signs.
To me the system of \Bbb Q is fairly intuitively secure. We can build computable maps from \Bbb Q to \Bbb Q, no problem, though here already we ignore the finitude and materiality of computation. The river \Bbb Q is a river of melted crystal, with intact crystals on the temporal surface. (Are you wincing at my poetry ? ) It manifests as crystalline, with the fierce beauty of the digital or discrete. But we operate with \Bbb Q with a sense of its “infinite background.” In theory, between any two rational numbers, I have an infinity of more rational numbers. The “set” is “dense.”
The system \Bbb R is far more controversial, for those who bother to wrestle with the philosophy. In practical life, we mostly use a finite set of floating point rationals. We “justify” what we do with them maybe in terms of a semantically vague formalism. Primarily one does as one does.
Weyl, protege of Hilbert, was one of the most prominent mathematicians to care about this issue.
The view of a flow consisting of points and, therefore, also dissolving into points turns out to be mistaken: precisely what eludes us is the nature of the continuity, the flowing from point to point; in other words, the secret of how the continually enduring present can continually slip away into the receding past. Each one of us, at every moment, directly experiences the true character of this temporal continuity. But, because of the genuine primitiveness of phenomenal time, we cannot put our experiences into words. So we shall content ourselves with the following description. What I am conscious of is for me both a being-now and, in its essence, something which, with its temporal position, slips away. In this way there arises the persisting factual extent, something ever new which endures and changes in consciousness.
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This language of “faces” of objects makes the most sense in a nondual understanding of consciousness as precisely the being of those faces.
As flesh-and-blood perciever, I am a thing in the world. The “consciousness” of this flesh-and-blood perceiver is the “being” or “presence” of (faces of) objects.
In more ordinary language, the consciousness I call “yours” is the being of the entire world from another perspective. It is “yours” because the temporally-spatial present is understood in relation to the sense-organs we call “yours.”
What is the difference between a perception and a memory ? What I perceive is “here” and “now.” I can remember something that was “there” and “then.”
I agree. I think “becoming” is a synonym of “time” understood as “being,” with “being” understood as the temporal synthesis of all the objects moments. For me this makes being “open” or “incomplete.” Objects have a “dark future” in their being.
Right, but my question asks as to whether things “show their faces” (taking that to refer to ‘interact with’ or ‘relate with/to’) other things we consider to be non-sentient.
Right, being is only complete up to the present moment (that is the present moment of the being given that there is no universal present moment). By saying that objects have a dark future, do you just mean that the extent and the character of the future for any object is uncertain?
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Ah !
Now that gets us into Harman’s work.
For me, “consciousness” is an awkward name for the very being of such faces. So Harman would call me a correlationist.
Sort of. But I don’t understand “uncertainty” as an internal state, a feature of a “consciousness stuff.” The world is an ongoing event. The river is an ongoing event.
In a certain sense, given the character existence, the future is “primary.”
For instance, what is world-for-you right now but an imposition of a projected on the present implicitly in terms of the past ?
As I see it, world-face has the “character” or “structure” of a motivated organism’s “stream of experience.” And yet I do not therefore call it “internal” or “apart from” some “true and external” reality.
Let me say, just as a person, that I consider my view counter-intuitive and weird. So I don’t expect others to just nod their head or even find it plausible. From my POV, it comes from following the “empirical directive” discussed by Braver.