Philosophy Now Forum

odysseus wrote: ↑Wed Feb 19, 2020 4:25 am I have no issues with, well, such abundance as your website presents. And pushing matters to extremes in art and other indulgences neither offend nor compel. I only try to be clear about the most extraordinary thing there is about being human, which is metaethics, metavalue, which is the philosophical study of the art you celebrate; and metaphysics, the way to describe the threshold between plain thought and actuality. I am driven to this because I experience the world like this.
But it does require one to take an interest in Fink's phenomenology in order to find it engaging. Philosophy is not poetry, though some things poetical are philosophical, like Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman. I find the control of thought to be essential to competently move where thought does not go, and the revelations are not aesthetic, but existential (though, one can never avoid aesthetic presence in experience. See Dewey's Art As Experience).
Your website demonstrates an extravagance with serious ideas that perhaps make for exotic and novel syntheses, but in doing so, compromises the chance to look deeply into the secret, even mystical possibilities that inhabit our world. To me, it is one thing to create art that reveals extraordinary things, but here, one remains IN art, which is like being IN a narrative. I can't live a story. I have to have reality.
At any rate, you have seen the kind of thing I do. I take Fink and the like to be a vehicle to insight, even revelation, but it takes a philosophical mentality. If you wish to move forward in an analysis of this text, then good. If not, that is ok as well.

Thanks for glancing at my site. I really didn't expect you to. I have no problem with you being you. Your style does teach me something. I take seriously Wittgenstein's saying that that which we cannot speak we must pass over in silence. I do speak the unspeakable and I am not silent, therefore what I say is madness. I cross Kant's critical divide and utter the noumenal. I go where a proper philosopher is forbidden to go. Philosophy at its extreme is madness or mania as Plato called it. I write the gods. I will continue to read Fink and I will continue to roll my eyes at his ways. As he would at mine. It's fun. I detest Dewey, that Hegelian. Philosophy without poetry is philosophy that is afraid of approaching the moment of extreme phenomenological reduction. A philosopher with a good reputation is not a philosopher.

But don't judge a philosopher by her cover. It's a job, but underneath there can be extraordinary things going on. A Buddhist sits, but sitting is not the Buddhist.

Your comments about art are interesting because they open an issue: when a philosopher of substance, a mystic, by my lights, someone who is not simply a thesis, but understands that this world through and through is metaphysics (not the textbook df) and in the presentation of things there is an abiding sense of, let's call it Biblical gravitas, and this why we have words like 'divinity', a word that is taken by science to be just an extension of the ordinary, or, in Kantian language, an empty spinning of dialectical wheels in concepts like the soul, God, freedom; but speaking of Kant, he really is very helpful, and this is to the point: he puts restraint on speculative attempts to nail metaphysics down (notwithstanding that he also restrained engagement and founded positivism that keeps meaningful utterances either empirical or analytic, and this reduces human possibility to the trivial import of a proposition's truth value. Emmanuel Levinas annihilated this kind of thinking), and metaphysics can go wild, and IN this chaos of narratives, myths, moral condemnations issue forth freely, unchecked and stupidity can reign. This stupidity impedes going deeper. The one thing that stands between a person and divinity (as a thoroughly eidetically reduced term) is interpretation. This grants that art can evoke powerful things, glorious aesthetics "truths" that can disclose what convention tries to conceal. But where art can be intuitively strong, it remains interpretatively weak, that is, the articulation of what is happening beyond the incidental elements of say, a play by Antonin Artaud remains in the air. The experience is somehow important beyond what we can say, it presents a perspective that is undermining, even dangerous; but one is left only with this residuum of uncertainty, uncanny, and one is partially undone, which is the point.

Philosophy takes this and examines it, if it is done without the hindrance of intruding taboos. It can attack assumptions of living and bare its core! Hindus call in jnana yoga (but they also have bhakti yoga, which is the yoga of devotion, as with Jesus, etc. Well, go figure). Philosophy clears the path of sutpidity that distorts and misleads.

This is why I am committed to rigorous examination of the world at the level of basic assumptions. Only here can I find interpretative freedom to move forward and not get distracted by errant thinking which can vitiate the purity of the process. Kierkegaard, Husserl and Fink, Heidegger, Levinas, and others are very good for this.

I think, heh, heh...everyone should think like this.

odysseus wrote: ↑Wed Feb 19, 2020 4:56 pm

This is why I am committed to rigorous examination of the world at the level of basic assumptions. Only here can I find interpretative freedom to move forward and not get distracted by errant thinking which can vitiate the purity of the process. Kierkegaard, Husserl and Fink, Heidegger, Levinas, and others are very good for this.

There is the pressing question of just where philosophy is located. Is it “out there” in the Wild of Reality or is it in the published words of certain now-famous philosophers. I always remember the fight between the Arminius and Calvin. Arminius, the hero of today’s charismatic religionists, taught that one can know God directly and that in the moment of spiritual ecstasy one directly sees and hears God. Calvin taught that the fallen human mind has become twisted and deformed and could no longer have a direct experience of God and must rely on scripture and a lot of cross-referencing. That made Calvin the father of the internet and hypertexting there in Geneva.

So which is it? should we seek a direct experience of the Transcendent or should be ever be the scholar going over and over and over some text?

If we are to seek the Transcendent itself away from the text, how? I think that many, probably most, people today will say that it is in the face of one’e fellow human beings. Then philosophy becomes ethics. God is the other person. And Care. I don’t go down that path. I seek God directly. Therefore I, like a good American pioneer, run away to the Wild of the open sky where the buffalo roam. I go to Baudelaire’s Demi-monde. To the poor people of Nepal. To magic and the paranormal. Outsiders all. To William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and the Eyeball Kick. I fuck with text. To the erotic!

You seek gravitas, the depths, the mystery. I have always been a climber seeking the heights.

odysseus wrote: ↑Wed Feb 19, 2020 4:56 pm
this world through and through is metaphysics

I think, heh, heh...everyone should think like this.

Transcendental Idealists elevate the Self too high. It is nothing more that pure reflexivity. It is the “itself” in Color itself, Beauty itself, thought itself. And Divinity itself. Platonists like me love that word. But I don’t think the whole world derives from it. The Itself itself is not God. Though I do think that would be a fun idea to play with.

And then after they discover the human Community and call it a system of Monads they become downright Talmudic, i.e. Pharisaical. I really have nothing against Talmudic reasoning or Deconstruction as Derrida called it. It’s really quite fun, but not when it becomes oppressive.

For the Rabbis of the Talmud, the Great Council becomes the arbiter of Truth. That translates into today’s Great Council of Editors of Scientific Journals dictating to us what is authorized and given an Imprimatur. Of course they are free to change their collective mind at any time, because they are sovereign. Or rather they are above the Sovereign of the Universe. (I already sent you a link about this.)

On the bottom of page 23 of Fink it says “Transcendental life lives, as it were, always out away from itself in the world, it achieves itself in a deep "anonymity".” Yes, the self is The Anonymous. Such is mystical Talmudic thinking. But what is that “achieving”?

Today many anti-Semites point to the Talmud as proof that Judaism is evil. In the same way today many point to Deconstruction as proof that philosophy is evil. And many in the Analytic tradition point to the incomprehensibility of Continental Philosophy as proof that it is more than evil. I personally think it is all divine madness. I write my own version of that. I take my clue from the argumentative Jesus who was the maddest of all.

Here's an excerpt from that book I sent you - Literature and the Gods

In a century as wracked by upheavals as was the nineteenth, the event that in fact summed up all the
others was to pass unobserved: the pseudomorphism between religious and social. It all came together not
so much in Durkheim’s claim that “the religious is the social,” but in the fact that suddenly such a claim
sounded natural. And as the century grew old, it certainly wasn’t religion that was conquering new
territories, beyond liturgy and cult, as Victor Hugo and many who followed him imagined, but the social
that was gradually invading and annexing vast tracts of the religious, first by superimposing itself on it,
then by infiltrating it in an unhealthy amalgamation until finally it had incorporated the whole of the
religious in itself. What was left in the end was naked society, but invested now with all the powers
inherited, or rather burgled, from religion. The twentieth century would see its triumph. The theology of
society severed every tie, renounced all dependence, and flaunted its distinguishing feature: the
tautological, the self-advertising. The power and impact of totalitarian regimes cannot be explained
unless we accept that the very notion of society has appropriated an unprecedented power, one previously
the preserve of religion. The results were not long in coming: the liturgies in the stadiums, the positive
heroes, the fecund women, the massacres. Being antisocial would become the equivalent of sinning
against the Holy Ghost. Whether the pretexts spoke of race or class, the one sufficient reason for killing
your enemies was always the same: these people were harmful to society. Society becomes the subject
above all subjects, for whose sake everything is justified. At first with recourse to a grandiloquent
rhetoric brutally wrenched from religion (the sacrifice for the fatherland), but later in the name of the
mere functioning of society itself, which demands the removal of every obstacle.

There is the pressing question of just where philosophy is located. Is it “out there” in the Wild of Reality or is it in the published words of certain now-famous philosophers. I always remember the fight between the Arminius and Calvin. Arminius, the hero of today’s charismatic religionists, taught that one can know God directly and that in the moment of spiritual ecstasy one directly sees and hears God. Calvin taught that the fallen human mind has become twisted and deformed and could no longer have a direct experience of God and must rely on scripture and a lot of cross-referencing. That made Calvin the father of the internet and hypertexting there in Geneva.

So which is it? should we seek a direct experience of the Transcendent or should be ever be the scholar going over and over and over some text?

If we are to seek the Transcendent itself away from the text, how? I think that many, probably most, people today will say that it is in the face of one’e fellow human beings. Then philosophy becomes ethics. God is the other person. And Care. I don’t go down that path. I seek God directly. Therefore I, like a good American pioneer, run away to the Wild of the open sky where the buffalo roam. I go to Baudelaire’s Demi-monde. To the poor people of Nepal. To magic and the paranormal. Outsiders all. To William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and the Eyeball Kick. I fuck with text. To the erotic!

You seek gravitas, the depths, the mystery. I have always been a climber seeking the heights.

There is no doubt in my mind extraordinary experiences of many different kinds are . Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, the Darma Bums On the Road guzzling electric Koolade with Dean Moriarty, well, I've spent many quality hours in that twilight world, and I don't think I care to talk you out of it. It can have depth and wonder, depending entirely on who it is doing it. Most will trivialize it, not seeing it as, if you will, a cosmic adventure. Aldous Huxley wrote about mescaline and at the time was convinced such experiences were more real than real (and after all, what is the litmus for reality if not the "felt sense" of being there? There is no other, and I would go further and say that confirmation in the more disciplined quarters thinking are indicative of an unexamined inhibition). Magic, the paranormal, these are what I call threshold terms, not far afield from what Fink is laying down. Forget his tedious presentation (thresholds NEED this not to be new age silliness); he

Metaphors can make artificial divisions, e.g.s, the heights and the depths. I don't take them seriously unless they are properly contextualized: a height in what manner? Then the metaphor is lost, and it to yields greater clarity onexamination. Our history is littered with metaphor; a god is a metaphor that takes what we are and throws it into high relief upon the horizon. But there is no one there and while it may it may bring exciting drama into the world to think that way, we are denied this doxastic indulgence in the end, but not because we have a driving desire for the mundane (though this is certainly in there), but because what these metaphors possess is something beyond themselves and metaphors stand in the way; they "stand in" for the world, as Derrida put it, and they present the limitation of the familiar, for metaphors are the familiar, in religion and errrr, other mystical endeavors, that make the distance between us and the world bearable.
I speak of metaphors because you speak of seeking God directly. To do this, one has know about what directness is and be watchful of implicit wandering where experiences may be strong, suggestive, but underneath there assumptions at work that need exorcising. Sex, for example: observe it phenomenologically, in and of itself, not allowing it to be artificially raised beyond what it is, not contextualizing it parasitically with love. Intense, but in nature, appetitive only. It has no intimation of beyond what it is, like a good meal or a ride on a roller coaster, it is self contained, and privileging this in a system of values that takes seeking God directly, will go no where. But then, it is massively perverse to call it bad, isn't it? It's just the opposite of bad, that is, considered in and of itself. Sex simpliciter is very, very good. My complaint is that it trivializes the whole affair of God (not that absurd metaphor), for sex is, to invoke Kierkegaard, finite, and God is of the desire for consummation of desire beyond this.
Speaking of Kierkegaard, he offers a discussion of this in his Concept of Anxiety: there is nothing intrinsically wrong with sex (contra history, the church dogma, orthodoxy), but when a person comes to the threshold of understanding and beholds her boundness to this local "quantitative" body of affairs that hold our affections, sex becomes a hindrance.

Transcendental Idealists elevate the Self too high. It is nothing more that pure reflexivity. It is the “itself” in Color itself, Beauty itself, thought itself. And Divinity itself. Platonists like me love that word. But I don’t think the whole world derives from it. The Itself itself is not God. Though I do think that would be a fun idea to play with.

It is frankly to the point. The epoche allows us to separate the playful musing from actuality. But to want to be serious, herein lies the rub. There is much I can say, but I'll leave it at this: being serious is not dry academia; it's looking at the world and discovering what seriousness IS, and realizing it encompasses all.

And then after they discover the human Community and call it a system of Monads they become downright Talmudic, i.e. Pharisaical. I really have nothing against Talmudic reasoning or Deconstruction as Derrida called it. It’s really quite fun, but not when it becomes oppressive.

For the Rabbis of the Talmud, the Great Council becomes the arbiter of Truth. That translates into today’s Great Council of Editors of Scientific Journals dictating to us what is authorized and given an Imprimatur. Of course they are free to change their collective mind at any time, because they are sovereign. Or rather they are above the Sovereign of the Universe. (I already sent you a link about this.)

For me, there are a lot of free thoughts in this that are put out as flyby's.

On the bottom of page 23 of Fink it says “Transcendental life lives, as it were, always out away from itself in the world, it achieves itself in a deep "anonymity".” Yes, the self is The Anonymous”. Such is mystical Talmudic thinking. But what is that “achieving”?

I suspect you have an understanding of ideas that holds them to abstractions. They are not. What one achieves by bringing questions to bear on foundational issues where one can confirm the anonymity of the transcendental "life" is a liberation implicit thought that binds one to mundane interpretations.

Today many anti-Semites point to the Talmud as proof that Judaism is evil. In the same way today many point to Deconstruction as proof that philosophy is evil. And many in the Analytic tradition point to the incomprehensibility of Continental Philosophy as proof that it is more than evil. I personally think it is all divine madness. I write my own version of that. I take my clue from the argumentative Jesus who was the maddest of all.

Why not take your cue from yourself, conscientiously set on understanding the world from a position of freedom from the authority of other doctrines?

Here's an excerpt from that book I sent you - Literature and the Gods

In a century as wracked by upheavals as was the nineteenth, the event that in fact summed up all the
others was to pass unobserved: the pseudomorphism between religious and social. It all came together not
so much in Durkheim’s claim that “the religious is the social,” but in the fact that suddenly such a claim
sounded natural. And as the century grew old, it certainly wasn’t religion that was conquering new
territories, beyond liturgy and cult, as Victor Hugo and many who followed him imagined, but the social
that was gradually invading and annexing vast tracts of the religious, first by superimposing itself on it,
then by infiltrating it in an unhealthy amalgamation until finally it had incorporated the whole of the
religious in itself. What was left in the end was naked society, but invested now with all the powers
inherited, or rather burgled, from religion. The twentieth century would see its triumph. The theology of
society severed every tie, renounced all dependence, and flaunted its distinguishing feature: the
tautological, the self-advertising. The power and impact of totalitarian regimes cannot be explained
unless we accept that the very notion of society has appropriated an unprecedented power, one previously
the preserve of religion. The results were not long in coming: the liturgies in the stadiums, the positive
heroes, the fecund women, the massacres. Being antisocial would become the equivalent of sinning
against the Holy Ghost. Whether the pretexts spoke of race or class, the one sufficient reason for killing
your enemies was always the same: these people were harmful to society. Society becomes the subject
above all subjects, for whose sake everything is justified. At first with recourse to a grandiloquent
rhetoric brutally wrenched from religion (the sacrifice for the fatherland), but later in the name of the
mere functioning of society itself, which demands the removal of every obstacle.

You sent me a book?

I have read many such things. All of it outside the phenomenological reduction. Far, far too much extraneous thinking here.

odysseus wrote: ↑Thu Feb 20, 2020 10:59 pm

There is no doubt in my mind extraordinary experiences of many different kinds are . Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, the Darma Bums On the Road guzzling electric Koolade with Dean Moriarty, well, I've spent many quality hours in that twilight world, and I don't think I care to talk you out of it. It can have depth and wonder, depending entirely on who it is doing it. Most will trivialize it, not seeing it as, if you will, a cosmic adventure. Aldous Huxley wrote about mescaline and at the time was convinced such experiences were more real than real (and after all, what is the litmus for reality if not the "felt sense" of being there? There is no other, and I would go further and say that confirmation in the more disciplined quarters thinking are indicative of an unexamined inhibition). Magic, the paranormal, these are what I call threshold terms, not far afield from what Fink is laying down. Forget his tedious presentation (thresholds NEED this not to be new age silliness); he

We do seem to have a different understanding of what is going on with the Beat Poets and those others you mentioned. You say that they can have depth and wonder. You seem to want to make them examples of expressionistic art, full of feeling and somehow a description of the artist’s life. I don’t see them as expressionistic at all. I see them a “conceptual” as in Conceptual Art. That latter came from Marcel Duchamp and the ready-mades. Conceptual Art is not formal and full of profundity. It is purely conceptual. Burroughs had the cut-up style and Ginsberg had the eyeball-kick. Kerouac was not a writer, but, as Capote said, a typist. They are all presenting Art as Art. They are not writing about life.

The question is What is Art? as opposed to aesthetics. Aesthetics presents the beautiful to look at or listen to; it is about feeling and formal delight. That is not Art. Duchamp took ordinary objects and put them in a museum on a plinth, signed them and said they were Art. There is no aesthetics there. Art is when you rip something out of the context of life and hold it up as a thing to behold. Then it is ana-thema, placed up high, sacred, and dead. Here’s one the early important papers by a then-new conceptual artist.

http://zeitgenoessischeaesthetik.de/wp- ... osophy.pdf

Also this site is important - http://ubu.com/ I particularly like Kenneth Goldsmith - https://www.youtube.com/results?search_ ... +goldsmith

odysseus wrote: ↑Thu Feb 20, 2020 10:59 pm . Sex, for example: observe it phenomenologically, in and of itself, not allowing it to be artificially raised beyond what it is, not contextualizing it parasitically with love. Intense, but in nature, appetitive only. It has no intimation of beyond what it is, like a good meal or a ride on a roller coaster, it is self contained, and privileging this in a system of values that takes seeking God directly, will go no where. But then, it is massively perverse to call it bad, isn't it? It's just the opposite of bad, that is, considered in and of itself. Sex simpliciter is very, very good. My complaint is that it trivializes the whole affair of God (not that absurd metaphor), for sex is, to invoke Kierkegaard, finite, and God is of the desire for consummation of desire beyond this.
Speaking of Kierkegaard, he offers a discussion of this in his Concept of Anxiety: there is nothing intrinsically wrong with sex (contra history, the church dogma, orthodoxy), but when a person comes to the threshold of understanding and beholds her boundness to this local "quantitative" body of affairs that hold our affections, sex becomes a hindrance.

The epoche allows us to separate the playful musing from actuality. But to want to be serious, herein lies the rub. There is much I can say, but I'll leave it at this: being serious is not dry academia; it's looking at the world and discovering what seriousness IS, and realizing it encompasses all.

Here again you are dismissing sex as something that is shallow and without the profundity of love and life. I agree. Sex is purely formal. It is of the Platonic Forms. It is repetitive and always the same. The abstract Thing shines through. The only feeling is a glint of light at the end of your dick. Sex is conceptual art, not expressionistic. I speak as a gay male. If you are female, then never mind.

Again, the essence of sex is in the repetition. I cruise the streets and ever again that one Form that has obsessed me forever is there. Again and again and again. I fall into a trance. I fall into the Abyss of Infinity. This is conceptual art.

odysseus wrote: ↑Thu Feb 20, 2020 10:59 pm Far, far too much extraneous thinking here.

I think you like Fink and Husserl because they as nominalistic philosophers present an ethical world of real persons, not Platonic abstractions.

Jorge Luis Borges is one of my favorite writers. He was an anti-realist, but he very well describes the strangeness of the Real.

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.

tapaticmadness

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.

I should be clear on this, I find writing like this most definitely entertaining, occasionally very insightful, and a meaningful part of what Richard Rorty called the conversation humanity has with itself. I found the most illuminated thought on Plato in Heidegger, his essay on the essence of truth, and I bring him up because his hermeneutics builds on Husserl, and Husserl is right in their disagreement. All of the above, even where matters hover around the basic meanings, is a narrative, and is part of the very thing that occludes liberating philosophy. Plato is a distraction, as are Aristotle and Borges. To see this, one has to faithfully and abidingly (as Kierkegaard puts it in Fear and Trembling, moment to moment; but then, even he found that beyond his skills) deploy, if you will, the phenomenological reduction. See Anthony Steinbach's Mysticism and Phenomenology on this. In the reduction, all of this is suspended. Steinbach argues that there is a certain "verdicality" inherent in the epoche, as if a higher ground reveals itself.
But for this to be compelling at all, one has to be convinced the way to find God is not through the endless production of artful elaboration. Rorty thought a bit like this, thought that philosophy was simply literature, and he was very helpful, but missed the critical point because like most strong intellectuals, he simply loved the the entertaining affairs of writing, arguing and discussing; talent like his can be too distracting, for the epoche is a path outward and away from art and conversation, and

toward

the profound center from which all things come, a renunciation of the world. Don't read Husserl or Fink to find epiphany or anything that is associated with words like 'divinity', because they are not anything beyond the thick prose they write, which, I should add, is what this is all about: to span the distance between words and their logically concatenated knowledge claims, and actuality. Putting Fink down and picking up Kierkegaard helps see this. Read, if you have a mind, his Concept of Anxiety. Fink is helpful because he the epoche is a tool, a method, and he constructs a more precise method.

Btw, this enterprise to find God is all about ethics. Not in the systems of right and wrong behavior, but in the essence of ethics: value, the ugh's, ouches, and ooohh's and ahh's that are presented, that are "givens" in the world. There is nothing greater than ethics, to put it bluntly, because ethics (I should say metaethics) is at its essence what it means to be great at all. This bisque is great!! But what does it mean, this greatness? THAT is the question that haunts humanity from a very, very great distance. Love, sex, and all the things that make life meaningful beg, in the analysis of what this is about, the question, what does it mean at all for something to matter? The metaethical question puts the incidentals aside, and an epoche is done on ethics.Te value in this is to dismiss the incidentals.

tapaticmadness
We do seem to have a different understanding of what is going on with the Beat Poets and those others you mentioned. You say that they can have depth and wonder. You seem to want to make them examples of expressionistic art, full of feeling and somehow a description of the artist’s life. I don’t see them as expressionistic at all. I see them a “conceptual” as in Conceptual Art. That latter came from Marcel Duchamp and the ready-mades. Conceptual Art is not formal and full of profundity. It is purely conceptual. Burroughs had the cut-up style and Ginsberg had the eyeball-kick. Kerouac was not a writer, but, as Capote said, a typist. They are all presenting Art as Art. They are not writing about life.

The question is What is Art? as opposed to aesthetics. Aesthetics presents the beautiful to look at or listen to; it is about feeling and formal delight. That is not Art. Duchamp took ordinary objects and put them in a museum on a plinth, signed them and said they were Art. There is no aesthetics there. Art is when you rip something out of the context of life and hold it up as a thing to behold. Then it is ana-thema, placed up high, sacred, and dead. Here’s one the early important papers by a then-new conceptual artist.

The essence of art is the aesthetic, and the aesthetic is transcendental. This issue I have thought through fairly well, and if you are going look into what art is essentially, you have to deal with two things: the concept of art and the artworld's current paradigms, on the one hand, and on the other, the unchanging essence of art.
As you know, standards are not things that are fixed, any standard, and just when you think you have found what it is, it moves on, and authentic investigation "inside" of art inevitably moves into a deeper analysis that looks at foundational matters. These foundations are outside of the artworld.Just as Kant's Critique is outside the American Constitution, an examination of the foundations of art are outside art. All analyses are like this, they lead to analyses beyond what is included therein. Biological studies that go deeper into organic structures end up studies in chemistry, and deeper still, particle physics, and deeper still? You guessed it: philosophy. But philosophers have "found" nothing beyond to posit; they are not like the biologist that has to study chemistry, but are stuck with basic assumptions. Here, while the world flounders in interpretative vagaries and Picasso's hair trimmings become valued like religious relics (the artworld is a silly place, but like politics, it is redeemed only in importance people ascribe to things, which is arbitrary to art.....or is it?), they do encounter the givens of the world. If a person can learn to think and perceive phenomenologically, s/he has arrived at the foundation of all knowledge claims, for here lies the "unchanging essence" of art. Prior to this epoche, there is the naturalistic attitude, as Husserl put it, which is derivative of what is given in the epoche. The epoche claims to be a foundation that is. if you will, what IS, an absolute, uncluttered by extraneous ideas.
This makes the artworld derivative and vague. It has reached the point where there is nothing that is outside of what art can be, and I think it was Danto and others who placed (It was White and Dickie? I'd have to look see) , and even philosophy can be taken up AS art. This term 'as' is crucial here: Heidegger's hermeneutics (and I'm not talking about his "Work of Art" essay) makes all conceptual identities a taking up of something "as" and this is, in my view, the way an art object is to be identified, and this I'm sure is Danto: I see a camel in a cloud, that is, I see it AS a camel. And I see the duchamp's urinal AS art, because it is in the exhibition hall, offered as art, breaking the rules, but the breaking of the rules itself is art, and on and on. We are now in conceptual art where thought is part and parcel of art. Why? because the art institute has evolved into this, toying at first about how a toilet could be art, then moving into theory, theory shattering paradigms, then acceptance.....Read Thomas Kuhn's "Structures.." for the same applies here: there is no settling these matters, UNTIL and epoche brings inquiry down to earth, to the structures of perception itself.
Here, one meets God, and not some contrived reflection of the world in the imagination. Until one does this, practices this epoche in all things, one will never understand that experience itself, all of it, even when it seems clear of false thinking, is a think body of narrative, The epoche gets beneath this, and the what or why cannot be said.

odysseus wrote: ↑Fri Feb 21, 2020 6:12 pm The epoche gets beneath this, and the what or why cannot be said.

You wrote,
"In the reduction, all of this is suspended. Steinbach argues that there is a certain "verdicality" inherent in the epoche, as if a higher ground reveals itself.

the epoche is a path outward and away from art and conversation, and

toward

the profound center from which all things come, a renunciation of the world.

If a person can learn to think and perceive phenomenologically, s/he has arrived at the foundation of all knowledge claims, for here lies the "unchanging essence" of art. Prior to this epoche, there is the naturalistic attitude, as Husserl put it, which is derivative of what is given in the epoche. The epoche claims to be a foundation that is. if you will, what IS, an absolute, uncluttered by extraneous ideas.

there is no settling these matters, UNTIL and epoche brings inquiry down to earth, to the structures of perception itself.
Here, one meets God, and not some contrived reflection of the world in the imagination. Until one does this, practices this epoche in all things, one will never understand that experience itself, all of it, even when it seems clear of false thinking, is a think body of narrative, The epoche gets beneath this, and the what or why cannot be said."


You are preaching to me about the epoche. I think what you are saying is that I have not set aside all my preconceived ideas, biases, prejudices, personal proclivities, natural tendencies, horny desires, childhood indoctrination, and self-centered navel gazing. That I haven’t gone to the thing, the phenomena, itself. You are telling me to open my eyes and look at reality. You want me to be more like you.

What one finds after performing the epoche is debatable. Everyone thinks they have reached rock bottom. You try to be hard on yourself, a seeker of truth, honest to the last drop. I think you are just a materialistic atheist. For me philosophy is pleasure. I am not a masochist like you. After you find the liberation you so want, then what?

odysseus wrote: ↑Fri Feb 21, 2020 6:12 pm
foundational matters. religious relics (the artworld is a silly place, but like politics,

The quick history of the Epoche. Let’s begin with Aristotle. He had what is called the hylomorphic view of things. Everything is a subject with properties. Those properties or Forms (morphe) inhere in the subject or hyle (matter). Moving along to Descartes, that subject became the Self. the I, and the properties became sense data. Then, because there are no external relations in any of that philosophizing, the Self, the mind, with the phenomenal sense data inhering in it lose all connection to the world “outside itself”. Berkeley finished off the very notion of matter tout suite.

With Husserl, in the Cartesian Meditations, we still have the Self and phenomenal properties inhering in it, but we, in the meantime have passed through Kant. So now even beyond the empirical Self there is another noumenal Self. The Noumena becomes the ultimate Subject. It has derived from and finally replaced Aristotle’s Hyle, Prime Matter. Dark and beyond knowing.

Prime Matter was also supposed to ground the Hic et Nunc, the tode ti. Eventually the Hic part dropped off and we are left with the Nunc, the Eternal Now. Time is the ground of the Self. Time is the ground of everything. As Hegel said, Das Sein des Geistes is die Zeit. We could also say that Time is the substance of the world. Phenomenology at last bows before, not the Self, but Time. And phenomenology is materialism. High Romanticism tending toward decadence.

You are preaching to me about the epoche. I think what you are saying is that I have not set aside all my preconceived ideas, biases, prejudices, personal proclivities, natural tendencies, horny desires, childhood indoctrination, and self-centered navel gazing. That I haven’t gone to the thing, the phenomena, itself. You are telling me to open my eyes and look at reality. You want me to be more like you.

What one finds after performing the epoche is debatable. Everyone thinks they have reached rock bottom. You try to be hard on yourself, a seeker of truth, honest to the last drop. I think you are just a materialistic atheist. For me philosophy is pleasure. I am not a masochist like you. After you find the liberation you so want, then what?

Of course I want people to be more like me, I mean, agree with me. That's what it means to have a difference of opinion: I think I'm right. So does anyone who ever wrote a thesis. It's not preaching, I hope. Preachers are dogmatic. I am Kierkegaardian, though. I think the reduction leads to what the Hindus and Buddhists have been telling us for a very long time, though Husserl and Fink are more articulate, detailed and painfully so; so much so it takes considerable philosophical resources to even approach them. Husserl was not understood for a long time.
Materialist atheist? How am I that? Masochist? Oh, you mean because I think sensual and appetite indulgences don't go anywhere. Well, that is true. They are what they are. They are stand alone, although! they do present a value, and value is inherently transcendental, and what I mean by this takes the matter into a discussion of metaethics and metavalue. See G E Moore's Principia Ethica, not the whole thing, but a chapter or two. Value is mysterious. Sex is mysterious because it possesses value, and at the level of basic assumptions,value is the most extraordinary thing there is, and this is not an argument but an obvious truth, an apriori truth, for value is important because it is importance itself. It is a general concept that subsumes all particulars that have value, which is everything, for the reduction treats all things as bundled eidetic actualities, not as material whatever's (materialism is just bad metaphysics), and in these ideas that constitute a "thing itself" there is the value, for value is IN the bundle. Even the most ,mundane apprehension is tacitly cared about.
Once one is "liberated"? Ask the Dalai Lama. Ask Pseudo Dionysus the Areopagite. Ask me and I will tell you there is a proximity to God, an intimation of divinity, and these terms answer themselves, or they have no answer at all. Closest I can say is, it's just like falling in love. The world becomes transfigured, because that is what love does to all things. One has to keep in mind that our words, words like 'love' "steal" meanings; they "reduce" and trivialize, that's their job, for the world is too great otherwise to live in, too tragic and too beautiful.

What I just said about language reducing the world to a manageable form because the world is too tragic and too beautiful to be apprehended otherwise; this is actually worth repeating. When we open ourselves more earnestly to the horrors and and beauty of the world, via the epoche, the world stops being the world, Heideggerian dasein is suspended.

odysseus wrote: ↑Sat Feb 22, 2020 4:01 am

You are preaching to me about the epoche. I think what you are saying is that I have not set aside all my preconceived ideas, biases, prejudices, personal proclivities, natural tendencies, horny desires, childhood indoctrination, and self-centered navel gazing. That I haven’t gone to the thing, the phenomena, itself. You are telling me to open my eyes and look at reality. You want me to be more like you.

What one finds after performing the epoche is debatable. Everyone thinks they have reached rock bottom. You try to be hard on yourself, a seeker of truth, honest to the last drop. I think you are just a materialistic atheist. For me philosophy is pleasure. I am not a masochist like you. After you find the liberation you so want, then what?

Of course I want people to be more like me, I mean, agree with me. That's what it means to have a difference of opinion: I think I'm right. So does anyone who ever wrote a thesis. It's not preaching, I hope. Preachers are dogmatic. I am Kierkegaardian, though. I think the reduction leads to what the Hindus and Buddhists have been telling us for a very long time, though Husserl and Fink are more articulate, detailed and painfully so; so much so it takes considerable philosophical resources to even approach them. Husserl was not understood for a long time.
Materialist atheist? How am I that? Masochist? Oh, you mean because I think sensual and appetite indulgences don't go anywhere. Well, that is true. They are what they are. They are stand alone, although! they do present a value, and value is inherently transcendental, and what I mean by this takes the matter into a discussion of metaethics and metavalue. See G E Moore's Principia Ethica, not the whole thing, but a chapter or two. Value is mysterious. Sex is mysterious because it possesses value, and at the level of basic assumptions,value is the most extraordinary thing there is, and this is not an argument but an obvious truth, an apriori truth, for value is important because it is importance itself. It is a general concept that subsumes all particulars that have value, which is everything, for the reduction treats all things as bundled eidetic actualities, not as material whatever's (materialism is just bad metaphysics), and in these ideas that constitute a "thing itself" there is the value, for value is IN the bundle. Even the most ,mundane apprehension is tacitly cared about.
Once one is "liberated"? Ask the Dalai Lama. Ask Pseudo Dionysus the Areopagite. Ask me and I will tell you there is a proximity to God, an intimation of divinity, and these terms answer themselves, or they have no answer at all. Closest I can say is, it's just like falling in love. The world becomes transfigured, because that is what love does to all things. One has to keep in mind that our words, words like 'love' "steal" meanings; they "reduce" and trivialize, that's their job, for the world is too great otherwise to live in, too tragic and too beautiful.

"I think the reduction leads to what the Hindus and Buddhists have been telling us for a very long time ..." I think you are referring to Western Secular ideas about Hinduism and Buddhism, which really has absolutely nothing at all to do with village religion here, which is what I study. You have a very high class understanding of those religions. Very intellectual. And your talk about Value is also high class. I recommend Baudelaire and the demi-monde. And William Burroughs with his magical universe and wild boys.