What is a thing?

Metaphysics & Epistemology
1

Any six year old uses the word “thing” effectively. Everyone who speaks knows what a thing is, and how to refer to some thing when saying “that thing.” Thing refers to “that X", and is a “this” or a “one”, as in, “a unit”, or “an object”, or “one entity”.

But what is actually there, long enough, that we can point to some thing, and say “thing”? How do I make out one thing? What has been made out, where I clarify, “no, not that thing, the other thing”?

Heraclitus understood a thing as:

“It rests from change.” - Fragment 84

He is more addressing “how” things exist, implying “what” all particular things might be. He begins with the assertion that all things that are, are moving.

“Fire, having come upon them, will judge and seize upon (condemn) all things.” - 66

So what does the fact of motion tell us about the struggle that defines a thing?

“It is not possible to step twice into the same river.” -91
“On those who enter the same rivers, ever different waters flow.” -12

A more precise formulation of this is to say that it is not possible to step into the same river once.

“In the same river, we both step and do not step, we are and are not.” -49

“Motion” and “things” are entangled. Things that are, are moving things.

For Heraclitus, somehow, “same rivers,” are “different waters flowing.” So a river is never really identical with itself, or same, or a “river”, in the first place, just as the man who steps is always changing position while stepping and never the same exact man (nor, therefore, present twice to step into the same river; he is, and is not). The fixed identity of any one thing is itself in motion, so that a thing is always becoming, as in a river whose “ever different waters flow.”

Motion seems to seize and undo every ‘thing’, every time, instantaneously, in every place. Things becoming things, moving away from what they no longer are, towards that which they are not yet, is not a thing being a thing, in the normal sense of ‘being’ at least. Motion seizes all because:

“How can one hide from that which never sets?” -16

This is Heraclitus’ wisdom – things that are, are things that are in motion.

So it seems motion does not allow for things to stand still, to simply be. How, then can we ever find a thing, when all we find are only things undone – only undoing, only motion?

But motion can’t be described without something still, something that is not the motion, but is moved, or is moving, or coming to be.

Heraclitus said that all is flux, but he didn’t only say that all is flux.

“All things are an interchange for Fire, and Fire for all things, just like goods for gold and gold for goods.” – 90

An interchange is not merely interchanging motion, it is a thing interchanging. He spoke of “fire” and “things” in an exchange. Does flux itself, then, have parts; or maybe it is things, interjecting themselves and imposing themselves against the flux that make a continuous flux seem to have parts? Are there things parting things, or parting things parting?

To give further account of things that come to be, Heraclitus spoke of the bow used for a musical instrument, and only the tense bow dragging across the tense string begets the existing harmonious single note.

“They do not understand how that which differs with itself is in agreement: harmony consists of opposing tension, like that of the bow and the lyre.” -51

But instead of this picture of what a thing is carved out as the sound of a bow across strings, let us consider just the bow, like an archer’s bow. An archer’s bow, leaning in the corner of a room is the picture of stillness. Left leaning against a wall, it is not moving at all, or moved by any, as it stands there, motionless, in the corner. Yet what is this thing we call “a bow”? The bow, only with its wooden limb bending, and string tightening, is a bow. The wooden limb, so strong, it is tearing the string apart, while resisting desperately from being broken in half. At the same time the string is pulling on and bending the wooden limb towards breaking, while straining from being torn to shreds. There are many things at war in the picture of the bow. Yet this is true as it stands still, motionless, in the corner, against a wall.

This is the tension that it is like to be any single thing: in the bow, tearing and being torn make one and the same thing; standing still in the corner is a violent, surging conflict.

“The way up and the way down is one and the same.” - 60

Each seeming polar opposite – stillness and motion – each only present themselves when or where they are present together, at once, in tension. You do not have stillness without motion, because you do not have motion without stillness; or, you do not have motion without stillness, because you do not have stillness without motion. From any direction, the path that ends in a thing becomes its own cause; each pole of the tension begets the other, and neither comes first.

“What opposes unites, and the finest attunement stems from things bearing in opposite directions.” – 8

You don’t have a bow standing still in the corner unless you have the string being torn apart as it breaks wood in half.

Once you see what Heraclitus’ bow, what the man who both “steps and does not step into the same river” represents, you see bows, like rivers everywhere. In every argument, in every individuated object, in every heap, in every point, in every notion, in every physical act, in every foreign policy provision, in every word, in every “thing”, a tension has been drawn, like a bow, standing still, as a bow (war of wood and string, the coming to be of what is).

But there is a better example than the bow. The barley-drink, Kykeon, shows the tension (the how) that makes a thing (the what) be what a thing is.

Kykeon is a mixture of wine, barley, and cheese, maybe with some oil. It sounds like a vinaigrette, but it’s a wine drink, also called a barley-drink. The ingredients of a Kykeon poured into a cup would separate in the cup, and stay separated, some floating, some settling, oil not mixing with the wine. And so, sitting in the cup they are not yet the barley-drink Kykeon, even though they are poured together in the same cup. Heraclitus noticed that:

“The barley-drink stands still, only while stirring.” - 125.

You have to shake and stir the ingredients, and drink it while it is stirring, to drink a proper barley-drink. The particular barley-drink only exists, only stands still, as the particular thing that it is, while it is stirring.

“It rests from change.” – 84

That is what a thing is. That is how a thing is. That is how all things persist as fluctuating things.

To describe the basic nature of a thing, Heraclitus joins stillness and motion as one; Heraclitus is trying to force us to look for what one thing is, by understanding how one thing comes to be. It rests (what) from change (how). One thing comes to be because coming to be moves one particular movement. Things resist their undoing, so that undoing can undo things. Begetting newer things, begetting newer begetting things. Begetting and undoing are now directions one can simultaneously attend to where one simultaneously sees things, that come to no longer be things.

Tension.

Pausing for a moment, now we must face the fact that language is inadequate to the task we have set ourselves. Why do I think you might understand me, if I am using words to say absurd things like “a man cannot step into the same river twice” and “the way up and the way down are one”?

We are in a very rarefied and ephemeral space – where a naively held “thing” vanishes before our eyes as we wonder what and how any single thing might come to be whatever and however any thing is.

To speak of “things” this abstractly, language itself becomes an obstacle, like a thing clouding what we intend to say. That said, I’ll try to explain Heraclitus anyway.

“The path of writing is crooked and straight.” -59

When I talk about a drink with the ingredients wine, cheese and barley to explain the concept of what a single thing is, I habitually tend to think of the wine, the cheese and the barley each as a prior thing. These are quickly conceptualized as parts, as ingredients, as things. When stirring is joined with the other ingredients, we have an event that we can then name “Kykeon” marking this moment in the stillness of a name, a concept, like a nominalist marker. But this is a mistake.

Heraclitus is trying to describe (not explain) something universal, or better, ever-present, where any one thing is standing out as one, still, persisting thing. The wine, barley and cheese are stirring; they are to be understood all together, as the fire, as the motion, the stirring, the being or the becoming of a thing coming to be. The stirring itself is flux, fire, becoming – the “ing” of being (writing is crooked).

Here is where language most directly confronts at least my ability to express my idea (and I think Heraclitus’ idea). We in the West have been trained to oppose being with becoming. Something that is, is not changing at all, but is being still – it is just there; whereas something that is becoming, is in process, not yet there, but maybe potentially there, becoming actually there, until eventually it is no longer coming to be, but simply is. We draw an unbridgeable distinction between things being and things becoming that implicitly and necessarily opposes these separate forms of existence. But this is error. Being and becoming need not be set in opposition.

There is another distinction that brings being and becoming closer together, and that non-being, or nothing, or non-becoming. Call it what you will, the most self-evident antithesis of being is non-being. This reminds us of Parmenides - where being is, nothing cannot also be, and where nothing is, being is not. The phrase “nothing is” (which linguistically makes “nothing” an object, a thing, that “is”) doesn’t mean there is a thing, like a cold, empty darkness, that we call “nothing,” and that this cold empty dark thing, is. No, the phrase “nothing is” simply means things are not present. So the opposite of being, is not a being, but is nothing, or more precisely, non-being.

The same whole analysis can apply to becoming. The opposite of becoming is non-becoming. This sounds more non-sensical, simply because we never need to use this figure of speech to speak of “nothing”. The opposite of becoming is becoming nothing; this sounds better, but still, is strained.

Many have resolved these terms as a triad, where being, is not becoming, and both are not nothing, while nothing is not being or becoming. This triad can then be unified in a dialectical motion where becoming joins being with non-being, where things that are coming to be both exist in a sense, and do not exist yet, as they continue to become; Being is the fixed end result where that which is nothing, becomes after a process, some thing being.

But that is all distraction. From Heraclitus’ picture of a thing, it seems to me that flux is like an engine, the engine of being/becoming. Being is an activity, a motion. It is a running engine, and more precisely the running. I would think Heraclitus might say that the definition of being, is becoming. And taking some license, the “ing” in being, as it is in becoming, does all of the work necessary. Being is a momentary, present, mentally captured instance of fluid becoming - both being and becoming then sharing “ing” over different durations. The difference between a being and a becoming, is the amount of time and length of the naming process it takes to point each thing out, but each thing, is only a thing being a thing, which is no different than saying each thing is only a thing becoming a thing.

This stirring being/becoming running engine lies at the one edge of the tension. None of these stirrings or motions are the thing. Barley, wine and cheese all moving together in a cup are the mixing, the running engine, not the thing; and only this particular mixing makes a “this”, the first thing, namely, here, a Kykeon, a single, particular drink. “The barley-drink stands still, only while stirring.” Thing-ness, barley-drinkness, is the standing-stillness. Thing-ness is not there if/when the ingredients are stagnant, but once barely, wine and cheese are stirring, thing-ness first comes to be, immediately clear, called Kykeon; a new thing stands, and for the brief moments it keeps stirring, we have a barley-drink sitting there, still, in our cup.

The thing may only exist in motion, but now there seems to be the thing side of the tension, where stillness stands, the “what”, as well as the moving aspect of things, the “how”. This seems like two different places to look, like there are two different things. But we were trying to explain how one thing, like a barley-drink, simply is. The tension in the picture of the single barley drink is not formed as between two different things (as in the picture of the man and the river, or the wood and the string); now, the tension is found between the object, and its being or stirring or becoming. The object does not get to be a single, fixed, static, still object, unless there is a stirring.

Here we are tempted to then say that the form of this thing is where the thing can be spoken of, and that discussion can forgo reference to the being or becoming or stirring fire that quickens the thing into form; but we must remember we are only talking about one thing, and that is only “one thing” while it is stirring, so we are always talking about the stirring and its still form simultaneously.

Now, I bump into the compulsion (driven by my language) to think logically, linearly. I can conceptualize thing (such as barley-drink), separately conceptualize being (such as stirring), but these are not two different “things” though I’ve made two different concepts out of them. The barley-drink stands still. The barley-drink is the thing. The stirring is not the thing. The stirring is the being of the standing still barley-drink. That is not two things. That is one thing being one thing. That is one thing that has come to be, or is being, or is becoming (if you like).

I recall that, in the beginning, I assumed the fact of motion. Which now simultaneously assumes things being moved both into and out of being, or things becoming things. So have I done anything more than describe my assumptions? My sense is that, by describing something so basic, we describe the conditions for any explanation – we are forced here to again deal with language, to ground our language on the fact of individuated units (Aristotle) standing (Platonic form) while stirring (Platonic illusion - postmodern process).

To summarize, Heraclitus, in defining what allows identity to emerge in ubiquitous flux and change, said:

“All things are an interchange for Fire, and Fire for all things, just like goods for gold and gold for goods.” – 90

And in a more linear logically penetrable way (I now hope), he summarized what and how and one thing is as:

“It rests from change.” – 84

Heraclitus is more than a teacher of flux. He implores us, still, today, to see also the intercourse with permanent, eternal things that is the fiery nature of experience. And then there is the Logos, the language, the logic of our apprehension, crooked and vexing.

Why I will forever love Heraclitus: he is known for saying motion itself, or flux, is what is most real:

“Fire in its advance will judge and convict all things.” -66

But now, he forever stands permanently fixed in history as the herald of Flux. His very legacy, therefore, is a bow, a tension of opposites, a seeming paradox, as he has become the fixed father of the unfixed. Should his words be one day forgotten, consumed by time, he will be proven wise as his musings are exchanged for fire; but as we today stir up his name here, again recapturing the same Heraclitean flux, he, like motion itself, stands still, fixed, permanently in tension with the very meaning of such wisdom.

“The sun is new each day.” – 6

1 Like
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“You can’t step in the same river twice.” But you need the word ‘river’ to say even that.

3

Right. The surface of the assertion, “you can’t step into the same river twice” makes no sense. One way to go to make sense of it is say that it is false. The other way to go is to re-evaluate what a thing like a river or a man is.

4

Re-evaluating what a thing is seems right. A thing might be what becoming looks like when fixed long enough to be named.

5

Any objects can be called “thing”, when you forgot the name or word for it. It doesn’t exist. It is just a word to call or point to an object.

6

Great OP on a great theme !

This static river versus its flowing waters is arguably “the fundamental structure.” As hither-and-thither-ing waters to the river, we have numerals to numbers, and ever-new pronunciations of the same old word.

Mundane physical objects can be understood as glued-together “systems” of perceptions of those objects. Instead of the unity of the object hiding “behind” that object’s “faces,” we have the “interpersonal logical beyond-me-ness and beyond-now-ness” of an aspect or face that is therefore aspect-of and face-of. Time hides as it shows, precisely because the object bleeds beyond the now and beyond the me who perceives or considers it. Time shows by hiding, for each aspect occludes all others. To see the “barley” side of the coin is to not-see the Apollo side, and the reverse. But one sees the coin when seeing the side, unless the side itself is thematized, and that is perhaps our great gift, this endless ability to draw out new unities from old.

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So where do you think the “fixing long enough” happens? Does it happen by the mind who imposes a fixing still of a world in constant motion? Or does it happen in the thing, or with the thing, or by the thing coming to be recognizable as a thing?

I think shallower, surface interpretations of Heraclitus would conclude that fixing permanence happens in the mind, and is a mental construct only, because the world is ever flowing and nothing lasts as fixed. But this always made minds and talking about the world superfluous, because the truth was simply one - all is fire. On a closer reading, Heraclitus seems to be saying that fixing something that can remain unchanged occurs simultaneously as things change. It rests with change. Through change, permanence emerges, and it is the permanent that resolves any reference to a “thing”. We say “river”, we are pointing to something with a fixed definition, an essence, a permanent meaning, and that thing is “ever different waters flowing.”

8

So are you saying that fixed permanence is not found in the thing, but imposed by the mind?

We either experience separate things, or we are merely in the matrix, generating our own entire universes.

If we say motion and flux are truly in the world, and we know this because we experience it, we sense it, we are moved by it and move with it, and that all of the “things” we attempt to fix are for our own, cognitive reasons, and not reflective of aspects of the world in itself - then how do we know there is motion at all?

Heraclitus’, and my, initial assumption is that “motion is”. There is change. Fire. Flux. But further, baked into that assumption, things rest with change. We don’t wholly invent things to mark change; we observe and notice change because things rest from change. We wouldn’t be able to assume change, or anything, unless both things and change came together. And Heraclitus’ insight is that they come at once in the presence of one thing, whether that thing be a bow standing still in the corner (which is really a war of wooden limb versus string), or a river rushing too fast to clearly define.

9

What is a thing? An existent as it is, in juxtaposition to an object, which is an existent as it is thought.

Clean. Simple. Sufficient.

Or not……

10

So I think here you have pointed to a ton that needs unpacking.

My OP unpacks “existent as it is”. Concluding that existent as it is, is stillness bound by motion.

You are adding the cognitive function that allows us to communicate about it, distinguishing “object” from “thing”. I would take this to mean “object” is the mental takeaway, from the mind’s experience of a “thing”. So here, Heraclitus said, “there is a Logos.” This is another discussion, but intimately tied to all discussion (because Logos is logic, language, law, grammar, syntax, symantics…).

Nothing you succintly summed up disagrees with anything I said in the OP. I just think it needs to be unpacked.

Here is where I think we have gone astray from Heraclitus’ wisdom. Because the Logos requires a mind to exist, and because we can easily stipulate fixed, permanent definitions of “objects”, we confuse our definitions of objects (Logos, experienced only by minds), with the experience of things (stillness lingering in motion). You are distinguishing them, rightly. But if we don’t unpack it, we might fall into thinking that “All is Fire” says enough about the world, and think we must turn away from this world to find permanence and stillness in our objects of thought alone.

Or not… :wink: Just spit-balling Heraclitus…

11

I’d like to take the role of critic, although I essentially agree with most of what’s said in this text.

The world after Adorno, Foucault, and Deleuze has come to the conclusion that “Subject” and “Being” are like Tamagotchis from the 90s. They were popular back then. Remember that keychain where you had to raise a pixelated animal?

In modern philosophy (for example, in object-oriented ontology), it’s believed that things “withdraw” themselves from any of our descriptions. When you say something about a “thing,” you impose a functional role on the thing (or state).

Thanks to this, we realized that the “feed” button (Tamagotchi) is a social construct, and the “death” of the pixelated animal is just an algorithmic glitch. Philosophy in recent decades has been deconstructing the very body of this toy. We’ve been told that there’s no “soul” inside, only the microchips of ideology, language, and biology.

And then we get guys like us who claim, “I know how to make a Tamagotchi not die.”

Of course, it seems strange. Why revive something that’s already recognized as a simulation, and is generally uninteresting?

What’s the point of winning in a dead context? Modern philosophy, like modern philosophers, would call these attempts strange.

“Why bring back the subject if we’ve killed it?” After all, Harman and company are saying exactly that: “We’ve killed the subject; everything we have is now an object that eludes naming.”

If “being” is a Tamagotchi, then most people today either mindlessly press the buttons pushed at them by the algorithm (consumption, career, success), or have simply thrown away the toy and sit in the void (nihilism).

Therefore, I consider your approach important. It seems you’re making very important steps toward reviving the subject.

But if modern culture has recognized the subject as dead, then attempting to revive them seems like necromancy. Are we building a temple or galvanizing a corpse?

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A thing is knowable and perceptible. Thing-in-itself is unknowable and imperceptible.

Because a book can be called as a thing when the perceiver was indicating it as just a matter, and is physically visible, point-able, pick-able and readable.

But thing-in-itself of book cannot be known. It is beyond human sense experience, and it cannot be seen, picked up, pointed at, or read.

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@FireOlogist Here’s an example of a modern adaptation of my words from a previous post about Harman and company.

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That is the question. This is the kind of pushback this analysis needs to see what may withstand scrutiny, if anything.

In one sense, it makes no difference, because what Heraclitus was ultimately saying was that galvanizing a corpse is building a temple, or that we can’t distinguish corpses from temples without having both first, because each opposite taken singly, necessitates the other, and vice versa. “The way up and the way down is the same.”

But in another sense, because this is positive knowledge about the way the world works in itself, we are building a temple.

What I get from the exercise is that, in order to do anything, we move, and motion carries the fixed. Change is the changing of the fixed; the fixed thing is, from its motion.

So comparison of temples with corpses yields statements like “A man cannot step into the same river twice.” This statement reflects how it makes no difference if we call this wisdom building or playing puppeteer with a corpse.

But a mere capturing of one thing, like a corpse, yields statements like “It rests from change” or “The barley-drink stands still, only while stirring.” In this sense, I think we have positive understanding of reality. Things, if there are things at all (and why not assume that), necessitate, in themselves, both rest and motion. It’s an a priori, statement about identity.

A unit, a one, a thing, identified, defined, named, is because it becomes.

But language gets in the way a bit, because of the word “because”. This isn’t cause and effect. Motion isn’t first, and then, out of it, things emerge. Motion and fixed things come together, at once; or motion begets change while change begets motion. We need to understand how the “way up” is quite different from the “way down” to understand the one way of thinghood, but once we understand the one way of thinghood, it can make sense to us to say “the way up and the way down are the same.”

15

My interpretation of Heraclitus does seem to challenge Kant a bit. But I agree with Kant. Kant sets up the tension, the harmony of opposites for epistemology. The knowing subject is cut off from the thing-in-itself, confronted always with the phenomena of his own mind’s construction. So we have the knower on one side (the wooden limb of the bow), and the thing-in-itself on the other side (the string of the bow). Knowledge of things, for Kant, is impossible, and the unity that is the bow is phenomenal, void of the noumenal.

I think that is correct.

This is why I can only start this whole analysis with the assumption that “there is motion”. This is an assertion about the noumenal world. This is a sense observation, and inductive conclusion from constant conjunction, not necessary connection.

But once one willingly chooses to accept that the world is full of changing motions, Heraclitus is saying, a priori, we have simultaneously said that same world must be full of permanent, static things.

Personally, I think Kant ended science and any good faith, genuine inquiry into the physical or metaphysical world. He was right, in theory. I have to assume facts about observation to leave the spot Kant fashioned of mind in the universe. That makes Heraclitus seem naive for not addressing this epistemological issue. But personally, I get hungry and like music and laugh at jokes that I hear and see. I’m okay ignoring Kant and applying the fact that “it rests from change” to actual experiences as if they can be observed. Kant gets at this with his transcendental and social basis for objectivity. I don’t think this is naive - it is just the predicament of being a knower cut off from reality to be known.

And further, I think it is rational because, if we add Descartes, the notion “I am a thinking thing” it seems to me is at once a subjective analytic fact AND an induced fact about a thing in itself. I exist. I am a thing. I, therefore, do know at least one thing-in-itself that is and some distinct features identifiable to it and distinguishable from others. If “I” am the “man who steps”, and “river” represents the noumenal world/thing-in-itself, than because I have a priori concluded “I rest from change”, I know something about rivers in-themselves. They must rest from change as well.

16

HA!! We do what we can, right?

But does that tell us what a thing is, which was the original question? In other words, while movements presuppose either a congruent manifold of things in motion, or a single thing exhibiting a series of distinct motions, that doesn’t tell us anything about what a thing is.

I’m just sayin’, of all of that which a thing is, the very least of all, is the thing be an existence.

I don’t know how to unpack this from an Ancient’s perspective, so I’ll leave you to it.

17

As if the pattern that makes something recognizable as a ‘thing’ might emerge through change itself rather than being imposed on it. The river’s identity isn’t in any particular water. It’s in what the flowing consistently produces. Mind recognizes that. But it doesn’t create it. Fixing is something that happens in individual encounter with the world.

Maybe the fixing happens in language itself. Words are what we share. The river flows, minds change, but ‘river’ holds still between us. Not because minds impose it or ‘things’ contain it. But because language is how becoming gets stabilized enough to be passed between people. This view makes fixing fundamentally social. But pure convention floats free. And ‘river’ actually tracks something real.

What if fixing happens in the activity of inquiry itself? Not in ‘things’ alone, not in language alone, but in the ongoing process of people encountering reality and checking words against experience and against each other simultaneously.

18

“What is a thing?” strictly belongs to Metaphysics. But doing metaphysics goes nowhere until you unknot the situation by formulating the precise, simple question hiding underneath the initial one.

In your specific case, the real question is this: How is it possible that in a post as long as the Nile river, only the first 9 words actually make any sense? How is it that a 6-year-old possesses a highly effective understanding of the concept of a “thing”, whereas your 80-year-old study of Heraclitus has left you with absolutely nothing?

It is because Heraclitus, exactly like the totality of classical metaphysicians and TPF thinkers, attempts to directly articulate Thought to Things (Matter). That will never work. There exists only one metaphysical framework capable of functionally achieving this, and it is the MCogito system, not the broken aporias of Heraclitus.

Thought articulates to Life. A child’s grasp of the idea of a “thing” articulates to his mother’s biological care, to her love, not to some non-existent Heraclitean “river of Reality.” It is the mother’s biological grasp on reality—which includes the specific cognitive state of her child—that adequately transmits the functional meaning of the word “thing.” If you want a complete, working metaphysics of “things” instead of having to ask your mother again, go to the MCogito system.

So… will your next post on TPF be an Amazon-river-sized post containing a hundred references to the MCogito system?

Of course not. Because you are not here to actually think or to get a rational grasp on Reality. You are here to satisfy primate biological needs. You are here to perform social rituals—chanting your Heraclitus Pater Noster in the Church of Philosophy that is TPF.

Your actual problem is Newton: he stripped the supernatural from the Cosmos and totally devitalized it. Because you cannot openly go cry in an Abrahamic temple anymore, you are forced to rub your mind against alternative academic grandeurs.

For you, the name “Heraclitus” is merely a non-supernatural substitute for The Lord.

19

I personally don’t like talk of “mind” as a substance opposed to “non-mind.” I use the word “enact” to try to “empty the ( container ) subject.” A form of life is “performed” in a visceral way. Even signification is always “material” or “qualitative,” IMV. The subject is another thing in the world, itself given as moments. A. J. Ayer’s version of phenomenalism in LTL is surprising radical and psychedelic.

I’d say that we experience separate things, yes. Since “experience is world,” there are many separate things. Yet things “come and go,” as we may visit the same river only every few months. A manifestation of the river, the sight of it, its smell, and so on, might be called a “moment” of the river. Sometimes the river shows itself to you, because you are close to it. Sometimes to me, because I am. Our “consciousness” is the “presence” or “quality” of these moments or aspects. We “live” the “unity” of these moments as “that old river.”

The sun is new each day. The ancient sun is nevertheless new each day. Ancient the name and the intending, but fresh this morning’s blazing.

I agree that we are against bedrock here. We might speak of the “idea” of the object that glues together its moments, but we inherit a tendency to talk of “mind” as a substance. I suggest that we understand every perception of an object as a genuine “piece” ( moment) of that object’s “empirical being.” Consciousness is the “presence” of objects given as or through moments. Objects are present, one might say, as bundles of “quality.” Consider all of the ways a river manifests, to eyes ears hand nose memory etc. I suggest that the river is the “synthesis” of its moments. Given the presupposed “forum,” our own status as reasoners depends upon our sharing in these objects via perspectival perceptions ( aspect, moments).

FWIW, I think Plato’s unwritten doctrine is plausibly interpreted in this direction.

20

Not sure it is meant to be “cut off”. Thing-in-itself is to be postulated rather than perceived. Isn’t postulation also type of knowing? Knowing without perception. Knowing by believing, assuming and inferring.