Atla wrote: ↑Thu Aug 29, 2024 9:16 amSelf-Lightening wrote: ↑Thu Aug 29, 2024 7:40 amInteresting! Could he have been an exoteric writer? Or do you just mean that no one quite knows what (and whether!) anyone else is thinking?
I mean he couldn't write very clearly, so we have all kinds of interpretations about what his philosophy was. Not sure he ever even had a coherent philosophy.
He did, and you may well be wrong in putting the onus on him, because philosophers usually
can write very clearly, but just
won't—clear to non-(potential) philosophers, that is. In other words, they usually
do write clearly, but only for their intended audience. This is an important aspect of exoteric writing.
Atla wrote: ↑Thu Aug 29, 2024 9:16 amI don't see what's twisted about any of that. Can you explain?
Well that tells me that you could be a solipsist, if you don't see a difference between interacting with people who are actually real and interacting with people who only exist in our "minds".
Would that be a bad thing? (I'm literally no solipsist, though, but rather a solosomniist.)
Atla wrote: ↑Thu Aug 29, 2024 9:16 amNo. He specifically responded to Hume. He replaced Hume's fundamental distinction between 1) relations of ideas, and 2) matters of fact, by that between 1) analytic judgments a priori, 2) synthetic judgments a posteriori, and 3) synthetic judgments a priori:
Professor Lawrence Cahoone, "Kant's Copernican Revolution" (YouTube)
(I'm linking here to the heart of the matter, but I recommend watching the whole lecture, if not the whole series.)
Yes and it's an abomination. He misses the twofold nature of indirect realism which is the realistic approach. there is this phenomenal world in here, and there is a partially knowable worlds out there, and the two are connected.
Interesting! For this seems to contradict your previous post. I'll discuss that below.
Atla wrote: ↑Thu Aug 29, 2024 9:16 amIs it, though? See above.
Due to it's solipsistic nature yes.
Is there only a life of
others, then? No life of oneself?
Atla wrote: ↑Thu Aug 29, 2024 9:16 amIt's not necessarily true, no, and I'd agree that it's probably not true, but is it really what Kant was saying? Wasn't belief in a God for him an imperative of practical reason, not of pure reason? Like belief in other human beings?
Nor do our human minds have 100% uniform mental faculties.
I agree, though I can't really see why you're saying that
here.
Atla wrote: ↑Thu Aug 29, 2024 9:16 amOh and yes.. WHY should we employ any practical reason when THERE ARE NO OTHER PEOPLE?
First off, there
may be other (living) things in themselves. And foremost, we
have to do so for
our own sake.
Atla wrote: ↑Thu Aug 29, 2024 9:16 amWhy?
It's derived from external experience, yet always works.
Interesting! Could it be analytic knowledge
a posteriori, then?
It may also just be begging the question, though.
Why does it always work?
Atla wrote: ↑Thu Aug 29, 2024 9:16 amHow?
It makes sense to use three categories: phenomena, partially knowable noumen "out there" and 100% unknowable noumena "out there". But he just two categories which is kinda the point of his whole philosophy. Everything we know is consistent with the three categories view.
By "partially knowable noumen 'out there'," do you mean (Einsteinian) space and time, for example?
Atla wrote: ↑Thu Aug 29, 2024 9:16 amI disagree.
"The one intelligible theory of the universe is that of objective idealism, that matter is effete mind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws." (Charles Sanders Peirce, "The Architecture of Theories".)
All forms of idealism are probably wrong, as they are based on a made-up dualism.
At this point I shall address your previous post, of which I couldn't make much sense before. Let's see if I can make some sense of it now!
Atla wrote: ↑Thu Aug 29, 2024 7:59 amSelf-Lightening wrote: ↑Thu Aug 29, 2024 7:40 am
At this point, at least, I wasn't thinking of a
single mind (a universal mind), but a great many
particular minds. And I'm not claiming that anyone could actually
demonstrate that it is.¹ But take this image again:
If you postulate a universal existence that does not consist of mind(s), of (a) subject(s), you postulate one that consists of "matter", of (an) object(s)... But, as I put it recently,
'A subject is a being about which the question "what's it like to be that being" makes sense and has an answer; an object is a being about which the question makes no sense and has no answer.
(I suppose we could distinguish between real and unreal subjects, with an unreal subject being a being about whom the question makes sense but doesn't have an answer, but that would really just be another object: an object of imagination. And in fact,
all objects are imaginary like that, being mental constructs on the part of subjects. They may consist of subjects or a subject may consist of them, but they themselves don’t really exist, e.g. in Heidegger’s sense:
"Dasein existiert"!)'
As a mind, you only have actual experience of being a mind and having ideas. So why posit some third thing which is neither a mind nor an idea? That's just irrational!
No sorry, not only do I disagree with Kant but also the entire school of Western thought since Plato, or rather especially with the latter. My "Eastern" nondual take is just outside all of that.
There is no mental-material dualism, that's just something people made up without evidence. Instead mental and material refer to the same thing.
That may well be true. The entire school of Western thought you (seem to/think you) disagree with already started with Homer, by the way, and even he didn't make up the dualism, but actually already
sublated it:
"Her [i.e., Circe's] enchantment consists of transforming a man into a pig, with its head, voice, bristles, and build, but the mind (
noos) remains as it was before. [Odysseus's] knowledge, then, is the knowledge that the mind of man belongs together with his build. They are together as much as the [black] root and [white] flower of the
moly. There cannot be a change in one without a corresponding change in the other. Menelaus's encounter with constant becoming, in which there are no natures, must have been an illusion." (Seth Benardete,
The Bow and the Lyre: A Platonic Reading of the Odyssey, page 86.)
The mental-material dualism is part of the prescientific, common-sense view of the world:
"The scientific positing or taking for granted of nature is preceded by and based upon the prescientific one, and the latter is as much in need of radical clarification as the first. Hence an adequate theory of knowledge cannot be based on the naive acceptance of nature in any sense of nature. The adequate theory of knowledge must be based on scientific knowledge of the consciousness as such, […which] can be the task only of a phenomenology of the consciousness in contradistinction to the naturalistic [or positivistic] science of psychic phenomena. […The lack of such a clarification] makes so-called exact psychology radically unscientific, for the latter constantly makes use of concepts which stem from every-day experience without having examined them as to their adequacy.
According to Husserl it is absurd to ascribe to phenomena a nature: phenomena appear in an 'absolute flux,' an 'eternal flux,' while 'nature is eternal.' Yet precisely because phenomena have no natures, they have essences [
eidótes].Phenomenology is essentially the study of essences and in no way of existence." (Strauss,
Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, pages 35-36.)
And with
this, we come back to Kant—and Nietzsche—:
"'In order that there might be any degree of consciousness in the world, an unreal world of error had to—emerge: beings¹ with the belief in persisting things, in individuals etc.' (V 2, 11 [162]). What is called the unreal world of error here? Nietzsche’s answer reads: 'beings with the belief in persisting things, in individuals etc.' On a cursory reading, one might think that what is unreal about this world of error be only the belief of the beings that populate it. But the beings are actually themselves that in which they believe, namely individuals, more precisely put: that which they call their Being² organizes itself through their will to be individuals. Life means self-assertion; life rests on the delusion that there were a self-identical self, which can persevere through time, which can hold its own. Greek ontology calls that which perseveres as something identical through the changes of an organic being its εἶδος [
eidos], its form. This form is never purely realized. It never comes into full presence. But all the phases in the development of a living being may be designated as becoming or perishing, that is to say as degrees of approximating or moving away from the realization of the form. Therefore the form has the character of the τέλος [
telos]—the goal immanent in each living being. Greek ontology designates the self-identical τέλος as the true Being of each thing that moves. The designation of the τέλος as the Being of entities³ suggests itself strongly when one considers that becoming, that is, the transition into Being, is a process of approximating the immanent τέλος, and that perishing, conversely, is a process of moving away from the immanent τέλος. But with the decline and eventual fall of metaphysics, the possibility of designating a non-sensual, never given being as the true Being of the temporal vanishes as well. If the τέλος has no Being, then the only remaining alternative is to interpret it as a non-Being that presents itself as a Being, that is, to interpret it as show⁴. Now it remains true, however, that all life is only made possible by the fact that a being organizes itself in the striving after such a unity. One cannot say that the τέλος were a man-made fiction. Every living being is in actual fact oriented towards an organizing unity. Thus the show of the τέλος is a show brought forth by nature itself. Show, or, as Nietzsche also puts it: error, is the condition of the possibility of life. The unreal world of error is thus no man-made fiction but the real world of living beings. All living beings whatsoever exist only through the belief in persisting things, that is to say through their striving after the organizing unity of the τέλος. But that after which they strive never has a Being. Thus they exist only by virtue of error. The ultimate truth is the flux of things with the contradiction that it contains within itself.⁵ Torn into its opposites and formless, this ultimate truth is not world, either. There is only an unreal world; the real is nothing but pure negativity, time, or, as Nietzsche also calls it: suffering. But pure negativity has, by itself and out of itself, no subsistence⁶: it is only as it produces show out of itself, which however, because it stands in opposition to it, is itself not real either but only a show. […W]ithout show, the eternal flux has no subsistence. It must produce show out of itself. Show therefore belongs to its truth. […] In Nietzsche as in all philosophy that is to be taken seriously soever, consciousness is not a phenomenon of psychology. Nietzsche rather employs the concept 'consciousness' here as Kant does, who designates as 'consciousness soever' the horizon in which the truth shows up. Nietzsche thus means to say that through the opposition between the flux of time, which in itself cannot be, and the sphere of show, which however is just only show, the horizon is opened up in the first place in which the truth can get to show up, in which consciousness can emerge." (Georg Picht,
Nietzsche, pages 250-53, my translation.)
¹ The nominalized infinite verb
Wesen.
² The nominalized infinite verb
Sein.
³
Seiende, the singular nominalized participle of
sein.
⁴ The noun
Schein.
⁵ The contradiction between past and future.
⁶ The noun
Bestand.
Atla wrote: ↑Thu Aug 29, 2024 9:16 amMaterialism and idealism make no sense.
Yes and no: a subject is probably not a being about which the question "what's it like to be that being" makes sense and has an answer, because this take conflates two things: phenomenal consciousness which is probably universal, and the particular mind - what it's like to be that particular mind.
I didn't say that the answer could be known to
another particular mind/subject/being. It makes sense for another to ask the question, but only the one in question can fully answer it (more precisely, its experience
is the answer).
Atla wrote: ↑Thu Aug 29, 2024 9:16 amThere are no "beings", "subjects", "objects" anyway.
Feel free to say "minds" instead of "subjects", and "phenomena" instead of "objects".
Atla wrote: ↑Thu Aug 29, 2024 9:16 amObjects are probably also part of phenomneal consciousness.
Dasein doesn't mean anything beyond what's it like to be that particular mind.
As a 'mind' you also don't have the experience of being a 'mind', that's just another theorethical distinction, so why posit this distinction in the first place?
That's right: you are a mind, and a mind is the experience of having ideas. But that means it's not just the experience of ideas, but also of having them. The ideas are immanent to the mind, the mind is transcendent to the ideas. Without this distinction, there could be no distinction between ideas, either. The mind is the space in which the
particular ideas show up.