Time and Being : On Those Stepping Into Rivers

Metaphysics & Epistemology
81

I think a phenomenological and a Platonic reading would be radically different here.

In a Platonic reading, one might be tempted to treat the piece of ham as only a sensible sign, meaningful through something beyond itself — perhaps through an intelligible structure of pleasure, appetite, or the good.

But phenomenologically there is no abstract “ham” first. There is the dog already seized by a flow of instinct, already included in the situation: the flight of a tempting, beautifully smelling piece of ham, and the joyful leap toward it.

Analysis comes later. Analysis is already an exit from the process, a break in the living flow, a dissection of what Deleuze might call the desiring-machine.

82

Here Heidegger might perhaps object that you are moving Being into the category of beings. Heidegger tried to avoid this in every possible way, sometimes by rather questionable means, including the invention of his own language.

83

So I agree that “my Plato” is very very far from what others would like or expect of a Plato. Maybe I should even drop it as misleading.

But this it is what I’m trying to point at.

Now all of that non-conceptual significance ( the smell, the joy) is very important to me. It is all of this “non-conceptual quality” that is “articulated” into “pieces of ham” that “radiate” with value.

I see humans as “very clever dogs,” who are clever largely through the complexity of our stipulated sign system. Unlike dogs, we can get worked up by shapes of ink on paper. But the basic structure I’m pointing at is already there in the dog’s joyful leap at the piece of ham as a unified it. Note that the dog has to track the flight of this it as remaining the same it during that flight. Of course I can’t know this, can’t live as a dog, but dogs seem to enact enduring objects as they treat recognized humans as friends. “That’s that nice man who throws me ham to catch out of the air.” They don’t need an interior monologue, in my view, to indicate object permanence. They enact a sense of the enduring unity of important objects.

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84

Yes, but I would note that in this case we are not analyzing the dog’s experience from within the dog. We are analyzing language as a way of transmitting thought.

And our language, unlike phenomenological experience, works with objects — with beings — rather than with being included in a process, or being possessed by a process.

In addition, I would like to share my own experience. Some time ago I practiced knife throwing. The instructor taught me to use an intuitive approach.

And my best throws never felt like a separation of objects. It was always more like a process. I had the feeling of myself, the knife, and the target as one whole.

Moreover, in rare and best moments I already knew that the throw was finished, that it had already happened in the near future, and that it was only necessary to complete it.

And this is all the more simple, considering that there is no one there — neither me, nor the physical target, nor the knife — but only the final, almost formal affirmation of a future event.

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85

I suspect we’ve reached a point where we’re not necessarily disagreeing but rather talking past each other.

Yes, I don’t think we can avoid everything being supported in some fashion by a set of metaphysical assumptions. Wheeler seemed reluctant to take the step that Fuchs took, from ontology to epistemology, but I suspect that this might resolve to the internal and external perspectives – internal for the agent as the “what it’s like to be me, and to have to make decisions in the absence of sufficient information,” and the external being Wheeler’s self-excited circuit and Rovelli’s network of relations.

I may be saying the same as you, but I see beliefs as part constitutive of the “me.” They are the backdrop that informs the decisions I have to make in the absence of sufficient information.

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86

Beautiful. And this is very in the spirit of Heidegger at his most visceral, and unfortunately he only points in this direction and doesn’t much explore it. The hammer example is like this but not so poetic, at least not in English translation.

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87

Good point. So I am sometimes ambiguous as I jump from context to context.

I’ll try to clarify with my standby character Joe ( I run on fumes so pardon any frizzle.)

Joe is walking in the park when a large aggressive dog comes out of nowhere. World-for-Joe has the structure of “dog coming at Joe.” This “structure” would be Joe’s strong belief. Later he might try to remember what color the dog was. He’s not sure. So he’s reasoning about it. Weak belief is more conscious.

Strong belief is just the imposition of the world. The structure of the imposition. If I swerve around a squirrel that darts out, I “enact” a belief.

My comportment is “enacted prejudice” or “enacted expectation.” This is “visceral belief.” Even walking around furniture, stepping over mud, enacts belief.

So I’m using belief in a suspicious number of ways. I confess.

In once sense, belief is the structure of world-for-me.
In another sense, it’s verbal and conscious. I can put the structure of world-for-me into words.
In another sense, it’s visceral. It’s in my comportment, my body language.

“Thrown projection” tries to say that I comport myself with expectation in terms of my past. To comport myself one way is to not comport myself in other ways. So I never meet the object “pure.” The object-for-me is “contaminated” with my projections. I dig for the “true” object ( a better manifestation of the object) by making my projections “visible” to myself, typically by collisions of my expectations with the object. “The object should have done this, but instead it that.”

Inquiry is the adjustment of frustrated expectant comportment. This is how I read “the settling of belief” in a more visceral sense, which tries to avoid logocentrism, basically because I don’t think a “pure conceptuality” makes sense. So there is no purely conceptual belief.

I hope this isn’t too tangled.

88

Yes, that sounds right to me.

Well I’m having fun. We are tackling some wild ideas. So I’m glad for all of the stuff you right that I can parse without much effort ( because our approaches are similar in central ways.)

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89

This is also great. There is something “continuous and time-binding” in existence/experience. Weirdly we can use chains of iterable signs to point at it.

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90

It’s sufficient to tell me that we’re talking about different issues.

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91

We are all in the river the now. We cannot get out the river until our beings transform to non beings. The river will not allow us to go past or forward the now we are in. In that sense, we are in the same boat, no not boat. In the same river.

Time in the beings are all different due to our time of birth into the world is different, like we all stand on the different positions in the river feeling and perceiving different water passing by us.

The folks who stepped into the river long before us have all but gone, invisible and silent having left their past histories in the form of books and sayings.

And we see a lot of beings still stepping into the river unwittingly the fate they will be in for the rest of the time of their beingness in the river, not able to going back wards or forwards, just stuck in the present.

Beings don’t quite know what their beings will transform into after their beingness in the river. They could be dissolved in the water never to be ever existing, or they could be able to step put the river and allowed to step into the river again albeit in different water, having stepped into the river at different times and positions.

No two different beings can step into the same position of the river at the same time, like our personal time can only be lived by the individual who perceives the time of their life. I cannot live your time, likewise you cannot live my time.

I would appreciate your pointing out any possible / obvious faulty or bastard reasoning on above :slight_smile: - it is how I see the river, time and being.

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92

If a man cannot step into the same river twice, it is because a man cannot step into the same river once. This is because a man cannot leave the river in the first place, because the man never exists - only the river.

But then why are we (few) so concerned with philosophy?

How did we come to say “river” at all?

Seems “all is river” will not do to explain what confronts and resists flow, as it flows all the same.

We should have stopped at the explanation that ‘a man cannot step into the same river twice.’ All the moving and stagnant parts are there for the man who experiences anything besides what he calls himself, like a river. We need both motion and permanence to ontologically (not just mentally constructed) more than One thing in existence, and it’s obviously too late to wax poetically about there only being One thing (one ring to rule them all) as if we could ever really finish the unification of such warring factions as man and river. Spinoza tried and failed to impress.

There are many, temporary unities or units - I call them things. These things are fixed by their own motion (forming essence) and unfixed the motions that surround them from all sides (begetting, informing and reforming the thing’s essence).

All Motions are always in a body. All bodies, as Body, are fixed, still, motionless, but as such bodies are inspired by motion just to be, to become a body, they are undone as bodies and return to the river.

Being a thing is a pickle.

93

A thing, like “a man” is like a hurricane. It’s edges are frayed and constantly changing, around some invisible central location that can never be pinpointed - and yet, the hurricane is clearly a thing never to be confused with the earth or the ocean or the sun or the moon.

Things exist (they have to because here we are wondering how) - but they can be hard to identify and harder to define in words.

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94

That was a metaphorical expression on the new babies being born into the world even at this moment in somewhere in the world = stepping into the river.

What does the tautology suppose to imply? “Cannot stepping into the river again” was a metaphor saying human life is only for once and once only.

The river is a metaphor for the world, and water flowing is the time passing in the world.

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95

At least they’re entities in quantum loop gravity theory. I don’t know much about it, but if something is more fundamental than space and time, then it’s atemporal in the sense that it doesn’t exist in a pre-existing space and time. This is a sense in which being seems detached from time.

Apparently they do for loop quantum gravity theorists. Distances emerge from the number and complexity of a network of nodes that supposedly consist of dimentionless qubits.

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96

I would add this: when speaking about being and time (which are probably somehow connected), we inevitably encounter such a diversity of things that finding the entry point is quite difficult. When we begin to talk about a river, we forget that being is not only in the river itself but also beyond it, and you don’t necessarily have to enter it, because even on the shore, you continue to be in being.

@Corvus @j_j Could you suggest where we should begin conversations about being? With language? With consciousness? With cognition?

You would do me a great favor by pointing out the entry point.

97

Belief is good. So is comportment and construal. All these terms convey the alchemy of expectations meeting up with what occurs. But we don’t want to forget that world is ‘dog coming at Joe’ because this particular experience of threat, as well as the color of the dog or the size of its teeth or what breed of dog it is, only gets its sense and relevance from its role within a totality of interconnected and interdependent relations of mattering. It is only for this reason that my whole world is colored by the threat of the dog.

That’s why I find the focus on the present-at-hand object to be a bit misleading. Focusing on the object is just a naive way of focusing on the whole, on world in its mattering to us.

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98

I was just trying to give out my own metaphoric interpretations based on the ancient ideas and also partly some Heideggerian being and time in the topic here.

Some folks might resonate with it, but I am certain that many will not. Rather they will have their own interpretations and explanations on the topic i.e. time and being.

99

I didn’t ask without reason. Notice the paradox.

We know that water exists. How do we know water? How can we even say anything about water?

We know water only through its encounter with something else: for example, when we pour water on a fire, we know that water turns into steam and extinguishes the fire. Or when we immerse our hand in water, we discover other properties of water (wetness, heat conductivity, etc.).

It turns out that knowledge itself is only possible through the encounter of something with something else.

But what about being? How can we know being? With what can we encounter being if we can’t jump out of it? And secondly: logically, to know being, we need non-being. Somehow, we must encounter them. But how can we encounter being with that which doesn’t exist (remember, “being is, and non-being is not”)?

Of course, Heidegger encountered it with death. But there are several limitations here. For example, we can’t be 100 percent certain that after our death there is nothingness. And secondly, after death we can’t return to recount what happened there. So, by confronting being with death, Heidegger only theoretically approached the idea. But not in fact. We are still deprived of the means to understand being because we have nothing to compare it to.

Okay, we can say, here’s a sheep—it’s alive. Let’s kill it and see what happens. We kill the sheep, and it stops moving. Its body begins to decompose and ceases to hold together as a coherent object. Does this mean that nothingness (or death) is the cessation of everything? Unfortunately, this is again just an assumption. The sheep itself may have ended up in nothingness, but being itself has lost nothing: with the sheep’s death, it merely became food for worms.

Thus, when speaking about being, I see only problems and nothing definitive…

100

As far as I understand, all of Heidegger’s thought proceeded from the investigation of the pair hidden/manifest, and it was precisely the hidden, the dark, that he called Being.

That which is hidden is non-being, and this is what he considered close to Being, because if you remove everything that exists, only the possible remains — that is, time.