I think it’s the same as your “inter-personal synthesis”.
The river can only show itself by mostly hiding because what it is is inseparable from what it excludes. The positive character is real in this specific width, this color, this resistance against the foot. Yet that positive character just is this specific configuration of exclusions, such that the determinateness is positive while the structure of that determinateness is exclusion.
Yes, I think we are finding same-in-their-difference ways of saying it.
You will know the lion by its paw. Dramatic ending.
Of the broad daylight of presence, outside the gallery, no perception is given us or assuredly promised us. The gallery is the labyrinth which includes in itself its own exits: we have never come upon it as upon a particular case of experience—that which Husserl believes he is describing. It remains, then, for us to speak, to make our voices resonate throughout the corridors in order to make up for [suppleer] the breakup of presence. The phoneme, the akoumenom, is the phenomenon of the labyrinth. This is the case with the phone. Rising toward the sun of presence, it is the way of Icarus. And contrary to what phenomenology—which is always phenomenology of perception—has tried to make us believe, contrary to what our desire cannot fail to be tempted into believing, the thing itself always escapes. Contrary to the assurance that Husserl gives us a little further on, “the look” cannot “abide.”
Looking into Mind and World.
The space of concepts is at least pare of what Wilfrid Sellars calls “the space of reasons” When Kant describes the understanding as a faculty of spontaneity, that reflects his view of the relation between reason and freedom: rational necessitation is not just compatible with freedom but constitutive of it. In a slogan, the space of reasons is the realm of freedom.
…
But if our freedom in empirical thinking is total, in particular if it is not constrained from outside the conceptual sphere, that can seem to threaten the very possibility that judgements of experience might be grounded in a way that relates them to a reality external to thought. And surely there must be such grounding if experience is to be a source of knowledge, and more generally, if the bearing of empirical judgements on reality is to be intelligibly in place in our picture at all. The more we play up the connection between reason and freedom, the more we risk losing our grip on how exercises of concepts can constitute warranted judgements about the world. What we wanted to conceive as exercises of concepts threaten to degenerate into moves in a self-contained game. And that deprives us of the very idea that they are exercises of concepts. Suiting empirical beliefs to the reasons for them is not a self-contained game.
I have just begun looking into this book, and I expect McDowell to unwind this riddle.
How are signs the space of freedom ? Through constrained poetic acts by individuals. Bakhtin is worth hearing on this. We tend to presuppose language as monological. But it’s precisely our different ways of having the objects that allow for the disturbance of an “average field” of “faded meanings.”
What is the problem with “external to thought” ? The presupposition that signs, as objects out there in the world, don’t already radiate. That objects themselves, as generalized “signs,” don’t already radiate. This metaphor of radiance reverses the assumed direction, inverts the vector. Freedom is tacitly conceived as internal, dangerously liable to drift into meaningless via its “distance” from the external, like a “flower in the sky,” or a balloon lost in the winds of an skull emptied of a steady injection of intuition.
Intuitions come in. Representation tries to go out. Is this how things are ? Or do the signs I speak vibrate the air, and continue to surprise me myself, their speaker ? Does the poet anticipate the radiance of his or her signs ? Or are they a joyful surprise ? Shining with a not-to-be-anticipated radiance ?
The poet responds to this surprising radiance by elaborating it with more signs that intensify and develop the radiance of previous signs, just as our new signs radiate in relation of those which call them forth.
And what is this warrant ? Is this the judgment of a distant God ? Is their “actually” ( concretely) a universal warrantedness — warrantedness in the eyes and ears of God ?
Are signs vessels that enclose within themselves a universal immaterial meaning stuff ? Is logic a game of Chess with glistening perfectly-present-to-all essences ?
Do these vessels (try to ) re-present ? Do they carry images of the world that might be false ? Pictures that might give the pretty lady a mustache or bend her nose ?
Is this “representational effect” privileged ? But is my pointing finger Waldo ?
I still say that Kant’s analysis of time and space in the Transcendental Aesthetic holds. (This, despite the claims that the discovery of non-Euclidean geometry undermines it.) Kant does not deny the reality of time; on the contrary, he insists that time is a necessary condition of all possible experience. But he is insistent that time is not a determination of things as they are in themselves. Time is a pure form of intuition — the a priori (already existing) condition required for appearances to be given as successive or as simultaneous. If we abstract from the subjective conditions of intuition, Kant writes, then time in itself “is nothing.” This does not mean that time is unreal, but that its reality is inseparable from the standpoint of possible experience, and cannot be projected back onto things as they might exist independently of appearance.
This is a rich topic. We might see Kant as a (proto -) phenomenological ontologist. Whence the authority of Kant’s claims ? I think we scan his signs and see if we can find the shape of our own experience in their radiance ( significance-for-us.) Does he make this explicit ?
There is a tension in his poetic act. He presents us with the fixed form not of his interiority itself but interiority in general. He sets limits on what this interiority can access, yet in that very act speaks of the exteriority of the interiority of others.
He reasons with us, proves his points. He enacts the assumption of a universal onto-logic at the basis of each interior. This is not insane. The “forum” is either real in some sense or there never was philosophy. But it is precisely this presupposed but unacknowledged forum that is in tension with the assumption of a primary interiority. How does he know about our interiors from his ? That he claims to know works against the presupposition that he ( and we ) are trapped inside somehow.
He reads the flow of the world as the flow of a monitor through which we must see the world, as through a glass darkly. The analysis in logical terms is illuminating. Does he give us an absolute logic or a snapshot of living, malleable norms ? Consider what Peirce wrote later.
Can we abstract from subjective conditions ? These days I tend to understand the “thing-in-itself” as the “idea” or the “identity” of the thing. The “substance” of the thing is “logical.” The “thing-in-itself” as the “being” of the thing is a radically open temporal and interpersonal synthesis. In some sense, this is to indeed abstract from subjective conditions. The thing-in-itself is “beyond” any particular moment or aspect of itself.
I suspect that Kant read Voltaire’s Micromegas or at least considered intelligent life on other worlds. Hence his passing comments about “our” mode of representation, which would be “reality itself” if not a particular mode among others. This makes “the thing in itself” extremely open. How is the object there for a creature with seventy seven sense organs and three brains ?
If I were to say that “we can’t really think around time,” then I would be “guilty” of Kant’s visionary blindness. Recall that I claimed earlier that all vision is also blindness, and we ought to speak our visions as they seem illuminating for us. I can only say that I find it hard to make sense of, except as discussed above.
The question what is time ? becomes, the old wizard hints, the question who is time ?
“Am I my time ?”
But surely this “I” is not the face in the mirror ?
One approach:
Existence is a roaring torrent of naked reality. The so-called-witness is giving in the no-longer-witnessed.
Event. Fire. It itlessly burns and rages.
Also found in the TLP as “pure realism.”
Very nice, my fellow starer into fires.
Kant was one of the forerunners of phenomenology. You will know enough about Kant to know that his expression is extremely disiciplined and circumscribed. He’s not what you’d describe as an improvisational or impressionistic writer. From the opening sections of the Critique of Pure Reason>The Transcendental Aesthetic>Of Time
CoPR B46 - A31. Time is not an an empirical concept that is somehow drawn from an experience. For simultaneity or succession would not not themselves come into perception if the representation of time did not ground them a priori. Only under its presupposition can one represent that several things exist at one and the same time (simultaneously) or in different times (successively) ~ (trs Paul Guyer)
It’s really not a complicated proposition: awareness of empirical objects always takes place in time although the sequence of points in which the above appears resists any easy summary.
I think the shine of my signs for you is not what it is for me. His greatness is not in question. The book itself, as beautifully analyzed by one of its greatest translators and admirers, is very fuzzy and unstable in the use of its key terms. It was written in pieces over twelve years ( if memory serves) and Kant was concerned that he would die before completing it if he didn’t put out what he had. I bought the beast of a book by Norman Kemp Smith linked above, and it’s a fat lovely paperback with an excellent typesetting. Highly recommended if you don’t already have it. I have several copies of the CPR. Because I came to it “more seriously” after “dissolving dualism” (for myself), I can’t read it “religiously,” but I read it for inspiration. The issues have an infinite temporal depth — or is that an illusion ? (I’m joking here.)
What we have meant to say is that all our intuition is nothing but the representation of appearance; that the things which we intuit are not in themselves what we intuit them as being, nor their relations so constituted in themselves as they appear to us, and that if the subject, or even only the subjective constitution of the senses in general, be removed, the whole constitution and all the relations of objects in space and time, nay space and time themselves, would vanish. As appearances, they cannot exist in themselves, but only in us. What objects may be in themselves, and apart from all this receptivity of our sensibility, remains completely unknown to us. We know nothing but our mode of perceiving them a mode which is peculiar to us, and not necessarily shared in by every being, though, certainly, by every human being.
This allows for a reading of the thing-in-itself that verges on unintelligibility. Can those born totally blind “reason themselves” into understanding a colorful world ? But just this analogy is helpful. Are there creatures relative to which we are “blind” ? I find this plausible. Human reason is not essentially human in a biological sense, not if Kant makes sense here.
Many say that, but I really don’t see it. I think the major problem with the expression ‘ding an sich’ is the first word — ‘ding’. The use of the term ‘ding’ (thing) is problematical, because if it’s completely unknown, then how can it be a thing? I prefer, simply, the ‘in itself’ - which I take to denote the world as it would be in the absence of any observer. We can depict such a world, of course, and scientific cosmology does so with great expertise - but such a depiction still relies upon a perspective, even if it is as objective and independent of the subject as it is possible to be. (Which is generally disregarded because it is precisely the ‘blind spot’ of the natural sciences.)
Second, I was going to mention Emrys Westacott’s quote: ‘Kant’s introduced the concept of the “thing in itself” to refer to reality as it is independent of our experience of it and unstructured by our cognitive constitution. The concept was harshly criticized in his own time and has been lambasted by generations of critics since. A standard objection to the notion is that Kant has no business positing it given his insistence that we can only know what lies within the limits of possible experience. But a more sympathetic reading is to see the concept of the “thing in itself” as a sort of placeholder in Kant’s system; it both marks the limits of what we can know and expresses a sense of mystery that cannot be dissolved, the sense of mystery that underlies our unanswerable questions. Through both of these functions it serves to keep us humble.’
So I’m completely on board with that statement ‘if the subject, or even only the subjective constitution of the senses in general, be removed, the whole constitution and all the relations of objects in space and time, nay space and time themselves, would vanish.’ In fact, I remember discussing it with you previously, in relation to its interpretation by Schopenhauer, who unpacks the implications of that statement even more radically than did Kant.
Call it X, but what can it mean ? A serious question, because it pulses with life now as we consider it.
A complex gesture that many read that way. Epistemic humility through ontological arrogance. This “arrogance” is accidental or “blind.”
A picture held them captive.
That picture is the picture picture, the comportment toward experience as a picture of something else. I suggest that, sticking with visual metaphor, we instead consider this picture as a face of reality itself, remembering that reality has a terrible and wonderful infinity of faces.
“Comportment” suggests the depth of this enacted prejudice, and I suspect that such prejudice — in general — is non-optional. Following Gadamer, it precisely through collision with the object, and through or as time, that this prejudice is loosened up, replaced with a new prejudice that is better than the first we hope.
If the priority is indeed humility, then I think that granting the terrible reality of time is on our side. For this means we are always wrong, always incomplete. Our “finitude” is a remembering that this revelation is not the revelation, for this would make the object finite.
We can return to Kant’s X with this in mind, and perhaps even understand this X as a marker of our atemporal ignorance and blindness. On the other hand, we aren’t totally blind but only usually blind to the blindness implied by our vision, as we must be to live in the world.
To me the continuing profundity of Kant’s work is a testament to the very temporal depth of reality that we might read in it, perhaps against some of its moments.
Reviewing this, I can only say that this is an extremely rich proposition !
The relation of the object to time is precisely the intensely concrete issue, as I see it, at the center of this thread.
Takes place in “time.” The object settles in. The object tarries, if only for a nanosecond, between us, in the (time and) space of reasons.
Creatures share objects that tarry. These objects are “empirical” or experienced. What is experience ? It is personal. So we have the personal experience of shared objects that tarry.
What is buried in this simple proposition ?
I don’t think it is a struggle; that is already Derrida’s interpretation and the influence of Hegel. Time is not a movement of self-disclosure, at least not in Heidegger. What is closer here is the understanding of time as openness — a field of possibilities, where the realization of one possibility closes off another.
For anyone who might be able to use it or just want to object, I’ll share my foolish but sincere vision-blindness of the situation.
I suggest —ever tentatively — that there are two basic ontological comportments/frames.
First I present or picture the PICTURE FRAME.
The dominant frame, suggested by the metaphor of “frame” itself, is that consciousness or experience gives us some kind of untrustworthy picture of the world that is not the world itself. This picture is between us and the world. Because it is between us, we are “inside” and the world is “outside.”
Typically truth is understood as the accuracy of our picture of the world. Somehow the picture can be more “like” the world than other pictures.
In this framework, the goal of philosophical speech is to express an accurate picture. True speech is accurate picturing.
Usually the meaning of words is understood as picturing “content.” The surface of the word, its material, is a vessel. Inside this vessel is “meaning stuff” that pictures. The picture is even made of meaning that is not the world itself. The world is not meaning. It is pictured by the meaning of true speech. The speech is made true by the world agreeing with the meaning of the speech. The meaning of the speech is a picture of the world that may be false. The picture may not match the world.
There is plenty of freedom within this framework. Some may grant that the goal is accurate picturing but also insist that we can never check for a match and be sure. So we settle for what we hope is an approximately correct picture, usually because it is good enough so far for practical life.
Some may allow for a perfect picture through insight into a fixed atemporal structure. In this case, the fixed essence of the world can be perfectly pictured. In this case, the fixed eternal essence, but only this essence, is in the world itself and the picture at the same time. This may be expressed spiritually or in terms of mathematical physics or perhaps in terms of neo-Darwinism, etc.
The objects that we experience are of course only pictures of the true objects.
Between us as subjects there are of course always pictures.
The you that I experience is only a picture of you and not the true you.
Even if I forget this in practical life, it is important to remember it when I am serious about picturing the world accurately. I may justify my forgetting the picture in ordinary life by suggesting that the picture is surprisingly accurate anyway, for this or that reason.
In this framework accurate picturing is sacred. Theory is seeing, and ideal seeing is the seeing of a picture that is true — that is like the world and yet other than the world.
To forget the gap between the picture and the world is to fall into naivety. It is to falsely picture the world by leaving out the picture between us and the world.
For truth to be what we want it to be, there is only one reality and then a picture of that reality for every subject. One reality, many pictures. Between each subject and reality a picture that is just for that subject.
For some within the picture frame, time and space are only in the picture. Or at least we can’t say whether time and space are in the reality that is pictured in terms of time and space.
For most but not all in this frame, reality is OK with not being pictured at all. Pictures of reality happen perhaps when a certain collection of stuff in reality takes a particular shape. Pictures of reality can vanish and reality is not changed. All pictures can go away and reality remains as it was. The pictures need reality but reality does not need the pictures.
Perhaps this is my personal interpretation of Heidegger, but I think his philosophy leads to the idea that thinking about the world as a set of objects or metaphysical concepts is a particular metaphysical attitude.
Our thinking does not proceed from objects, but from our particular and literal involvement in this world, which is far from neutral. We rather think through concrete existence, which is unfolded in time, while objects — beings — are only what is ready-to-hand, what here and now has occupied our attention, again proceeding from a concrete context of existence.
Heidegger’s breakthrough to Being is an attempt to philosophically legitimize thinking through existence as such. The existentialists reduced this to the human being, but Heidegger was thinking something else: for him, this was a way in which the world is disclosed.
And really what choice do we have ? One of the deep things in Heidegger for me was expressed as freedom from standpoint = ruin of a subject.
Agreed. We become able to see that as one possible projection among others.
Here I might push back a little. Objects can be conceived as terribly rich. Perhaps you are using object to mean something more narrow. I see that. But in case not:
A woman we fall in love with is terribly and wonderfully there, and our involvement in this “object” is indeed “far from neutral.”
What I take from early Heidegger, among other things, is his critique of the deworlded object, the dead theoretical fetish that’s left behind when we insist that value is painted on by the subject. The genuine object sings a siren song or threatens us with agony, and so on. But here I am using “object” in a very rich sense, and maybe you’ll agree with me on these terms.
Here I take you to point at the continuous visceral contexture of world. This can be seen as a hot soup from which discrete objects emerge to submerge again. This also reminds me of Weyl and other mathematicians who lusted after expressing the continuum, paradoxically, in a discrete symbolism that they could not circumvent. Indeed, how can one say discretely and exactly what this smoky electrical eel of this continuum is ( by not being) ? The more discrete and exact you say it, the more in some sense you betray it.
Agreed. I’m tempted to speak of "the screaming face or turbulent naked torrent of reality itself. "
Very much agree. I see him as more and more trying to stress that activity of being or reality itself, as opposed to the activity of the subject. This is why Nietzsche would complete metaphysics by making the picture metaphor absolute. To make this picture metaphor absolute, to celebrate appearance as reality, inverting Plato, sounds like progress, but Nietzsche kept the essence of subjectivity, which is the will.
The picture made absolute, which is supposed to be beyond the “framing” of reality as picture, is just its most dynamic assertion, which is frozen precisely through that dynamism. The assertion of the subject become infinitely flexible, so that no feedback from the abolished lacuna of the picture, the gored lost world, can shatter a picture that is now liquid crystal. In all of this pretense of being beyond metaphysics there is the enduring devouring purpose of the picture, a self-transparent vector, its immobile secret from itself. The world ( being itself ) shows itself — with a stasis that is dreary at its core — as food, as resource, as mere raw material for the assertion of final man, fit for the tomb in his groom’s tuxedo.
This sophisticated dynamic appropriation of being — MacBeth dressed as Hamlet — takes itself as the last word of being that is finally purely present as pure passivity, even as the surface of it flickers with a false life.
I think we still think from a situation, from an event. And this event cannot be reduced to objects. In my view, this is precisely what Heidegger was working on.
Western metaphysics tries to penetrate into the essence of things, into their inner contradictions. Heidegger, however, suggests that things are not the main issue — although perhaps we have no access to Being except through things.
You write about Heraclitus’ river and focus on the river itself — in the sense that the river is not static and therefore expresses time. But why not focus instead on the verb: to enter?
We never enter the same river twice, not only because the river changes, but because we ourselves are different too. There will never again be the same situation of the world, ourselves, and the river.
To say that we cannot enter the river even once is, in a sense, to reduce the understanding of the world to an object that exists independently of us. But perhaps the point is that objecthood itself is not something the world simply has “in itself.” The world, without a subject or Dasein, may exist, but it does not appear as a world of objects.
You mentioned two frames but elaborated only one — what does the second look like? Is it the sense that apart from the world as it appears, there is a world which is just as it is, whether it appears or not? But even to say that is still to have something in mind — the world as it is, outside any viewpoint, reference, or picture.
The second frame would include my own view and similar views. So it won’t be unfamiliar given our ongoing conversation, but I hope to generalize somewhat.