Atla wrote: ↑Sat Mar 07, 2020 7:53 am
tapaticmadness wrote: ↑Sat Mar 07, 2020 7:38 am
Atla wrote: ↑Sat Mar 07, 2020 6:58 am
Something like:
In fundamental ontology, not reifying constructs like abstractions and types is part of any sane philosophy. In nondualism they don't reify made-up dichotomies either in fundamental ontology, for example subject vs object, I vs other, mind vs matter.
Yes, reification is the great intellectual sin that nominalism is always fighting against. Realists, of course, think it is no a sin. They see no act of reification. They think a mind merely discovers what is already there. It doesn't thingify an abstraction. I am a realist. I think abstractions exist external to the human mind. There is no need to reify anything. 'They are really already there. I suppose you could say I am insane, though I prefer the Platonic word Mad. Yes, the world is enchanted and the gods romp. Platonic universals are those gods. Human beings didn't make them through an act of reification. They have always been there. You are a hardcore nominalist. Rationalization and disenchantment seems to be your goal.
Who you think you are to imply that just because the world happens to be disappointing in many ways, disillusionment is anyone's 'goal'. It's simply that some people don't run from the truth even when it's disappointing.
I'm not running from anything. I am running toward something. Platonism, as it is presented in The Phaedrus is Erotic Madness. I run toward the erotic gods. I am erotic, sexual, to the core as is the philosophy I write. I understand that not everyone is as I am and that's fine with me. Ralph Waldo Emerson said that all of us are born either as a nominalist or a realist. I think the realist part of the population is by far the smaller. Here is something Jorge Luis Borges wrote. He is an anti-realist, but nonetheless, he does describe realism rather nicely.
Jorge Luis Borges
From From Allegories to Novels –
In the arduous schools of the Middle Ages, everyone invokes Aristotle, master of human reason; but the nominalists are Aristotle, the realists, Plato. George Henry Lewes has opined that the only medieval debate of some philosophical value is between nominalism and realism; the opinion is somewhat rash, but it underscores the importance of this tenacious controversy, provoked, at the beginning of the ninth century, by a sentence from Porphyry, translated and commented upon by Boethius; sustained, toward the end of the eleventh, by Anselm and Roscelin; and revived by William of Occam in the fourteenth.
As one would suppose, the intermediate positions and nuances multiplied ad infinitum over those many years; yet it can be stated that, for realism, universals (Plato would call them ideas, forms; we would call them abstract concepts) were the essential; for nominalism, individuals. The history of philosophy is not a useless museum of distractions and wordplay; the two hypotheses correspond, in all likelihood, to two ways of intuiting reality. Maurice de Wulf writes: “Ultra-realism garnered the first adherents. The chronicler Heriman (eleventh century) gives the name ‘antiqui doctores’ to those who teach dialectics in re; Abelard speaks of it as an ‘antique doctrine’ , and until the end of the twelfth century; the name moderni is applied to its adversaries.” A hypothesis that is now inconceivable seemed obvious in the ninth century, and lasted in some form into the fourteenth. Nominalism, once the novelty of a few, today encompasses everyone; its victory is so vast and fundamental that its name is useless, no one declares himself a nominalist because no one is anything else. Let us try to understand, nevertheless, that for the men of the Middle Ages the fundamental thing was not men but humanity, not individuals but the species, not the species but the genus, not the genera but God. From such concepts (whose clearest manifestation is perhaps the quadruple system of Erigena) allegorical literature, as I understand it, derived. Allegory is a fable of abstractions, as the novel is a fable of individuals. The abstractions are personified; there is something of the novel in every allegory. The individuals that novelists present aspire to be generic; there is an element of allegory in novel.
The passage from allegory to novel, from species to individual, from realism to nominalism, required several centuries, but I shall have the temerity to suggest an ideal date: the day in 1382 when Geoffrey Chaucer, who may not have believed himself to be a nominalist, set out to translate into English a line by Boccaccio – “E con gli occulti ferri Tradimenti” (And Betrayal with hidden weapons) – and repeated it as “The smyler with the knyf under the cloke.” The original is in the seventh book of the Teseide; the English version, in “The night’s Tale.”
The last paragraph of The Total Library by Borges –
One of the habits of the mind is the invention of horrible imaginings. The mind has invented Hell, it has invented predestination to Hell, it has imagined the Platonic Ideas, the chimera, the sphinx, abnormal transfinite numbers (whose parts are no smaller than the whole), masks, mirrors. Operas, the teratological Trinity: the Father, the Son, and the unresolvable Ghost, articulated into a single organism … I have tried to rescue from oblivion a subaltern horror: the vast, contradictory Library, whose vertical wildernesses of books run the incessant risk of changing into others that affirm, deny, and confuse everything like a delirious god.
From A History of Eternity by Borges –
The ideal universe to which Plotinus summons us is less intent on variety than on plenitude; it is a select repertory, tolerating neither repetition nor pleonasm: the motionless and terrible museum of the Platonic archetypes. I do not know if mortal eyes ever saw it (outside of oracular vision or nightmare), or if the remote Greek who devised it ever made its acquaintance, but I sense something of the museum in it: still, monstrous, and classified …
And a footnote from the same –
I do not wish to bid farewell to Platonism (which seems icily remote) without making the following observation, in the hope that others may pursue and justify it: The generic can be more intense than the concrete. There is no lack of examples to illustrate this. During the boyhood summers I spent in the north of the province of Buenos Aires, I was intrigued by the rounded plain and the men who were butchering in the kitchen, but awful indeed was my delight when I learned that the circular space was the “pampa” and those men “gauchos”. The same is true of the imaginative man who falls in love. The generic (the repeated name, the type, the fatherland, the tantalizing destiny invested in it) takes priority over individual features, which are tolerated only because of their prior genre. The extreme example – the person who falls in love by word of mouth – is very common in the literatures of Persia and Arabia.