In early materialism we see a movement toward life, not lifelessness. Heidegger and Feuerbach were both trying to dig below calcified 'theologies.' For both the facing of death was primary.

Philosophy is from this perspective necessarily personal, and yet it is personal in a way that seeks the living impersonal. The 'objective' approach enacts a fantasy of having no standpoint. This denial of our 'thrown-ness' keeps us on the surface, pretending to be armchair scientists. We must pose as already-having-always-known. Anxious interpretation is covered over pretending that the machine of language can do all the work. This machine of language has meaning-atoms for its parts. Philosophy is reduced to a form of dead math of relationships between meaning atoms --a machine for cranking out tautologies. A depersonalized approach also covers over the value of direct introspection with respect to meaning and motivation. The last fantasy is that insincere or emotionally closed conversations are the way to do things. This fits the image of philosophy as turning the crank on the argument machine.

The way of truth is the death of masks.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. I need to take a break from the forum to get some work done to pay the bills.

I'll share some thoughts on Feuerbach's philosophical religion. 'God' is all of us, greater than any one of us individually. Some are wiser and brighter than others, but even these are wiser and brighter because they are plugged into others, because they are open to difference, assimilating it and shattering one narrower self-conception after another. This world, in which we have bodies, is already the world for us. It could always use some work (giving something real to do), but a healthy body in healthy relationships with necessities met is already almost in paradise--if the mind is right. With philosophy (Feuerbach's vision), even death can be made sense of. As narrow individuals, we are already dead to the degree that we are not lit up where we should be. The threat of bodily death (ego death) encourages us to push beyond our petty self-attachments and grasp something like Feuerbach's philosophy in the first place.

The narrow world is widened. We think of the billions that come and go, the billions living equally meaningful lives, some of them always more meaningful, wiser and bright. Others get this or that righter than we do as we get something else righter than they do. Thanks to language and matter (the stuff with a kind of memory that resists being engraved), we inherit the work of others. Our work is passed on to 'reincarnated' versions of ourselves. For Feuerbach something like reincarnation seems metaphorically true. If we find the best part of ourselves in others, including those not yet born, then we don't exactly die. We feel and not only think ourselves the flame and not the melting candle.

The automatic, and instantaneous meaning is one's own meaning, the meaning produced by one's own habituation. It is not the other's meaning (the speaker's meaning). — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, I agree. Or rather I get that. I start from that. Maybe I should stress that, because I have the sense that jumping to the lived/ordinary point of view is misinterpreted as involving supernatural entities.

The brain throws up a picture of the situation. I can radically misunderstand the other. I am not wired directly to their brain. Except that I am, through words, gestures, facial expressions. Even if we can and do err in complicated situations (talking about talking about talking), ordinary life is quite a success.

It should be though, since consistent and important misreadings lead to death and ostracism. We've been at this for a long time, and those who can't get it (along with their code) are cast aside.

So when the meaning interpreted automatically and instantaneously by the hearer is consistent with the meaning intended by the speaker it Is not the case that the interpreter is processing the speaker's meaning. It is only when the interpreter takes the time to consider nuances and subtle differences, putting oneself into the speaker's shoes, through empathy, that one is actually attempting to experience the other's meaning. — Metaphysician Undercover

I know why you say this, and it is true from a certain perspective. On the other hand, I believe without proof that the word 'cat' throws up the image of a cat in your mind. I believe that this sentence throws up a voice in your mind, and that you understand me well enough in the way that I understand me. If you want to insist that these are different meanings (since they aren't perfect matches and are generated by different brains), then I can understand that. On the other, the entire point of our massive facility with language is to generate something like the same meaning in each consciousness. Stressing the difference ignores exactly what makes stressing that difference possible. Your speech act presumes that we can share meaning in some sense -- call it what you will.

I like your last sentence quite a bit. Empathy seems crucial, but I also think a certain courage is necessary. While we want to learn, we don't like to learn from a rival. If the situation is framed as a contest or argument and not as a genial exploration, everyone is a rival to be put in their place. As I see it, learning is largely a self-mutilation. We expose our network of beliefs to the violence of another network. Unless the lust for expansion over-powers the fear of mutilation, we apply tunnel-vision to an interpersonal situation where stepping back and seeing the basic situation is appropriate. Rather than pretending to be innocent of this, I confess that I speak from experience. That too seems like part of the self-mutilation --coming to terms with one's own pettiness and vanity. Excepting some technical and layman-irrelevant philosophy, I don't see how philosophy isn't a 'spiritual' practice if done well --nor how 'spiritual' practice can avoid self-mutilation (the destruction of persona.)

Yeah, our conversation was good and promises more in the future.

I guess you figured out the typo. Thanks for considering my response. I enjoyed your OP. Very well-written. Crisp.

I agree, you do not "observe" another person's meaning, you deduce, or infer it. — Metaphysician Undercover

'Deduce or infer' is not perhaps the best description. Even if we grant that ultimately the brain is quickly processing sense-data, the experience of others' meaning is far more automatic and instantaneous than that. Worrying about the brain issue obscures what is perhaps the priority: describing our lived experience of meaning with others. Since concerns about the brain and our isolation are themselves part of this lived experience, it's not clear that isolated brain talk is more fundamental. The structure is like that of a mobius strip.

Certainty need not be the foundation of knowledge. In fact, most people would probably agree that knowledge would be very limited if it depended on certainty (if most people even think about such things). — Noah Te Stroete

I agree. The key issue might be the ridiculous use of 'certainty' in the sense of beyond all idle or insincere doubt. There is a basic falseness to such uses. 'Real' doubt is a threat or an angst and not a game with words like chess. We presuppose others and a world from the moment we speak. I have a notation for this: others and world. The barred word points at a structure of consciousness and speaking in its vagueness. Debates occur when these basic structures are made explicit. Is the world 'mind' or 'matter'? Are others really there or just sims?All that is beside the point. Language has a vague but dominant structure of being-with-others-in-the-world.

The skeptic says 'prove that!.' The skeptic is talking to me, an other, and asking for a proof about my claim concerning our shared reality. What can 'prove' even mean apart from being-in-a-world-with-others? What is truth apart from some shared world? If philosophers debate about the nature of truth (correspondence, coherence, etc.), they presuppose the existence of this thing called 'truth' in a shared world that can be correctly seen or described. Before they have even agreed on the nature of truth, the presuppose it and seek it, in all of its elusive vagueness.

We can phrase this in another way. What is the minimum implicit commitment of the skeptic in his very expression of doubt? If a skeptic is really trapped in his own 'mind,' then the 'mind' distinction does not make sense. Nor does the distinction between the real and the unreal. Even a 'God' that fools one is only possible as a non-illusion if one already assumes something outside of the mind affecting it.

Beyond these theoretical approaches, we can consider how monstrous it is to think that others aren't really 'in' there. Breakfast of Champions explores this theme. Our beliefs are also emotionally grounded. Even the pursuit of truth 'beyond emotion or bias' itself motivated or biased toward this truth. 'I think therefore I am.' Who is this 'I'? What does it mean to 'am'?

Okay, but you're taking it to be evidence of public/shared/etc. meaning. It's not, because the phenomena in question are consistent with a theory of private/not-shared etc. meaning, too. — Terrapin Station

I don't think you understand what I mean by 'shared meaning.' It's not a supernatural 'thing' in the world. We can just describe it as a structure of first-person experience. If I am talking to a computer who passes the Turing test, that doesn't mean I don't experience 'shared meaning.' The theory of shared meaning can still be true if there is only one more human being alive hanging out with androids without knowing it. It's a sense that accompanies speaking and writing. It is the realm of intelligibility.

A man survives a nuclear war in a bomb shelter. He fortunately has lots of books. He reads his favorite philosophers. He experiences the words in these books as the voice of a person. A language user is never 'alone' in a peculiar sense. They grasp themselves as individuals with a language that is inherently geared to world and a community. There's no way to prove this. I'm ultimately describing a result of introspection, a structure of my experience which involves the sense of its universality.
But this sense of universality is also that which has us interpreting fire hydrants and clouds as also there for other consciousnesses. Since we live by such intuitions, I think it's fine to work from them and with them. Or rather we are going to in any case, so no need to exclude their consideration from philosophy out of a fear of their vagueness or uncertainty.

As associations that individuals make, and different individuals can do this in very different ways. — Terrapin Station

In which cubic millimeter of the brain does meaning live? Or does it exist as a mathematical point? At which exact instant does meaning live? I suggest that we have unwittingly projected physical science concepts on our experience of meaning so that its complexity is covered up.

And how would we know that others do so in different ways? How would we determine that? We presuppose some kind of overlap to talk about deviations from this overlap.

gain, it depends on the individual in question. Different people can think about the same thing (the same sentence) in very different ways. We can't make a generalization about how meaning works for anything (that is, in terms of specifics, exact content, etc.) that would be spot-on, because it's always possible (even if it doesn't contingently obtain at some point in time) for some individual to think about it differently than what we proposed. — Terrapin Station

It's always possible that everyone but me is an android passing the Turing test, logically possible. But I'd say we just do act within a massive field of presuppositions as we speak. I think you are worrying too much about epistemology and not introspecting enough. If you like, just report your own experience and don't worry about that of others. We can't do a certain kind of science. Science is itself caught up in that same ambiguity.

I'd say that you write these posts with a profound 'faith' in their sufficient intelligibility. I work from these basic presuppositions that structure consciousness --using these same structures. It's not an exact science.

A type of inherently mental linking, implication, and the like. — Terrapin Station

I agree. But see how we keep shifting from word to word. It's clear that no particular word is going to finally say it and contain the elemental meaning. This is that 'mental linking' trying to name itself. It can only do so by linking yet more words to those already being used.

As associations that individuals make, and different individuals can do this in very different ways. — Terrapin Station

I agree, but now we've shift to 'associations.' What or how is an association?

I don't agree with that either as a universal generalization. What I'd say is that it depends on how a particular individual is thinking about it, and different individuals can think about it in very different ways.

If we say, as a universal generalization, that meaning in sentences is very un-cube-like then Joe might object with, "Hold on a minute! At least for sentences x, y and z, I think of meaning as extremely cube-like!" — Terrapin Station

I'd agree myself that in simple sentences it is fairly cube like. 'The sandwich is on the table.' Very simple sentences involving familiar objects suggests the cube-like-ness of meaning. The atomic view of meaning makes sense here. But complex sentences such as occur in our conversation right now are more sensibly interpreted in the light of holism.

One thing I like to do is talk about the location of phenomena. In my view, the idea that there are any phenomena without a location is incoherent. The location might be pretty complex, and we might need to talk about a lot of different, sometimes separated locations functioning together, but there's still going to be a location. Nothing exists that has "no location." — Terrapin Station

I can understand that leaning, but I think the movement of meaning itself is dynamic. It makes sense to put meaning in the head. I agree. But how does meaning exist in the head? If we explore our use of words, I don't think we can pin-point meaning in any particular word. Endings of sentences can point to their beginning. This is why time is a big deal for Heidegger. In some sense meaning-making is time.

Again, it would be a straw man to assume that I ever said anything like "it only works in cubes" — Terrapin Station

I'm not saying that that is your view. If you agree that the meaning in sentences is very un-cube-like, then that's something we can agree on and investigate. IMO, this is a big deal. If words don't trap meaning-cubes then we can't really do math with them except in very simple cases. We are thrust into a more complex interpretative situation.

But my theory accounts for that, despite the fact that I'm stressing that meaning is strictly a brain phenomenon. — Terrapin Station

I'm not saying your theory is wrong. I'm just pointing out transparency.

That's like one of those Heideggerian straw men. No one is suggesting as much. — Terrapin Station

Again, just explaining 'transparency.' That entities can exist for us in this way seems worth noticing, given a tendency to think that only static, conspicuous entities are real.

Now we need to establish a direct relation between what is said and what is wanted, without reference to the medium of thought. — Metaphysician Undercover

As I see it, the attempt to really ground the entire system in this or that part is more or less doomed. Language is there like our lives. I mentioned grounding it in action, but this is really attempt to point at the dissolution of the word/action dichotomy. Let's think of waves, nods, winks, turn signals, words like 'hi.' We don't have clear propositional content on one side and mute action on another. These are extremes on a continuum.

As far as I can tell, there's just no way to squeeze this grasp/ground of how to be in a community of speakers and doers in one small aspect of that speaking-doing. This is the operating system that we look through like clean glass most of the time.

It's not a matter of translating words into other words per se. We could set up a machine to do that (a la the Chinese Room, say), but the machine wouldn't be doing meaning. — Terrapin Station

I agree with you here. The question is about the nature of subjective of meaning. It's not the juxtaposition of meaning cubes in one's mind.

Very simple sentences with nouns that bring images to one's mind are, admittedly, closer to this juxtaposition of meaning cubes. But high-level talking about talking manifests the complexity of the living relationship between the words in a sentence. Something like a cloud of meaning is generated by putting words together. It is not like a train of meaning crystals.

What is "transparent" use of words? — Terrapin Station

I refer to the way that words just pour out of us on the one hand and are immediately understood on the other. In most cases no effort is required. Language is not experienced as something 'in our way' that meaning has to be shoved through or sifted from. Language is the 'hammer' that vanishes in the hammering --suddenly becoming conspicuous when there's a problem. For instance, in philosophy language is radically conspicuous right now. Or rather what we are talking about (the transparency) is foregrounded by other words that we already understand and use like our hands reaching to turn a doorknob.

Wait, "the form of life" is another way of saying "life-form," right? In other words, a synonym for some species or other. What would be a "deep immersion" in a life-form?

Otherwise, I have no idea what "the form of life" is saying. — Terrapin Station

A 'form of life' is the way of living of an entire community. It's the way we talk, for one thing, but also how we drive on the roads, wave to one another, hold ceremonies when one of us dies, put on conical hats on birthdays, etc. We don't pick the closest urinal to one being used if possible or just stare at the strangers. We see a certain concrete structure and know these are stairs to walk up. How much of our getting around in the world has become automatic for us to smoothly fit in with other human beings in our everyday lives?

You too. Have a great night,

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I've issues with phenomenological jargon. — creativesoul

I can relate. It is suspicious sounding talk. But IMV this is what they were doing, exploring the lifeword. If Sheehan is right, then we aren't that far from Heidegger at the moment. His book, btw, is brilliant. It's written in honest English that gets to the point, aimed at sharing one basic idea really. I stayed up all night reading a few days ago. I have been reading, thinking, and writing too much philosophy. It's a mania.

Meaning emerges within thought/belief formation. Shared meaning is the birth of language. — creativesoul

Yeah, and this is also in some of those Feuerbach quotes. Language is something like a 'god' we participate in. I like his metaphors, but I don't want to lean on them too much. Talking about phenomena already looks like voo-doo to lots of people. Heidegger is seen as a mystic, which isn't quite right unless mystics were misunderstood phenomenologists. It's a weird thing that philosophy can do that maybe science can't, since science is largely locked out of even as it functions inside this space.

Shared... — creativesoul

Yeah. It's feels that basic. To say too much more gets lost in stuff that is debatable. What is the minimum commitment? That interests me. Others, A world of objects that makes assertions true-able.

Sure... we're adding meaning to this space, if by "this space" you mean the space shared between us. — creativesoul

Precisely. The space where meaning lives. To be clear, I intend nothing supernatural. Anything supernatural is just more explicit metaphysics --which always says too much and slips into aporia (or that's my sense at the moment).

Of course... our world is chock full of thinking about complex thought/belief replete with correlational content including language. — creativesoul

That's all I meant by self-enriching space. It's our creative thinking, creative soul, that I have in mind -- and we do this with our macrosoft operating system.

As if a space of meanings is the sort of thing that we say can enrich itself?

I say that that's not even close — creativesoul

What are we as humans? Are we not currently adding meaning to this space? Perhaps your vision depends on something I find problematic. I was trying to find my way around that mountain.

For me the shared world is the 'life world,' the world as it is for us in our ordinary lives. This world includes sense perception but also the perception of relations between sense objects and between other relations. Our being-in-it is pre-theoretical. When people call it 'mind' or 'matter' or a (?), they still refer to this that they are in, merely slapping a name on it, connecting it to various relations that exists within it.

IMV, Everest is indeed there beyond what we might say about it, but only because it is there-as-there-for-us, not in a simple kind of idealism but in the inexplicitness of the world.

The species has no existence apart form these individual organisms, and yet the perpetuation of the species involves the perpetual generation and destruction of the particular individuals of which it is composed. Similarly, Spirit has no existence apart from the existence of individual self-conscious persons in whom Spirit becomes conscious of itself (i.e., constitutes itself as Spirit). Just as the life of a biological species only appears in the generation and destruction of individual organisms, so the life of Spirit involves the generation and destruction of these individual persons. Viewed in this light, the death of the individual is necessitated by the life of infinite Spirit.

Death is just the withdrawal and departure of your objectivity from your subjectivity, which is eternally living activity and therefore everlasting and immortal. (GTU 323/111)

Arguing thus, Feuerbach urged his readers to acknowledge and accept the irreversibility of their individual mortality so that in doing so they might come to an awareness of the immortality of their species-essence, and thus to knowledge of their true self, which is not the individual person with whom they were accustomed to identify themselves. They would then be in a position to recognize that, while “the shell of death is hard, its kernel is sweet” (GTU 205/20), and that the true belief in immortality is a belief in the infinity of Spirit and in the everlasting youth of humanity, in the inexhaustible love and creative power of Spirit, in its eternally unfolding itself into new individuals out of the womb of its plenitude and granting new beings for the glorification, enjoyment, and contemplation of itself. (GTU 357/137)
— SEP

Wow. A flame leaps from melting candle to melting candle.

Pre-lingual thought/belief must as well, otherwise there would be no such thing as thinking about one's own thought/belief. — creativesoul

For me this could be explained by a self-enriching space of meanings. Meanings are 'objects' in the space. Right now we are adding meanings to the space.

This quote actually touches our conversation more directly. I am pretty amazed by how much sorta-Heidegger I'm finding in Feuerbach.

In Thoughts Feuerbach further argues that the death of finite individuals is not merely an empirical fact, but also an a priori truth that follows from a proper understanding of the relations between the infinite and the finite, and between essence and existence. Nature is the totality of finite individuals existing in distinction from one another in time and space. Since to be a finite individual is not to be any number of other individuals from which one is distinct, non-being is not only the condition of individuals before they have begun to exist and after they have ceased to do so, but also a condition in which they participate by being the determinate entities that they are. Thus, being and non-being, or life and death, are equally constitutive of the existence of finite entities throughout the entire course of their generation and destruction.

Everything that exists has an essence that is distinct from its existence. Although individuals exist in time and space, their essences do not. Essence in general is timeless and unextended. Feuerbach nevertheless regards it as a kind of cognitive space in which individual essences are conceptually contained. Real or three-dimensional space, within which individual things and people exist in distinction from one another and in temporal succession, he thinks of as essence “in the determination of its being-outside-of-itself” (GTU 250/55). In his being-one, Feuerbach argues, God is everything-as-one, and is, as such, the universal essence in which all finite essences are “grounded, contained and conceived [begriffen]” (GTU 241/48). — SEP

Mt. Everest...

Existed in it's entirety prior to our awareness and/or account of it. — creativesoul

This is more like After Finitude perhaps? The arche-fossil?

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That which exists in it's entirety prior to our awareness and/or knowledge of it's existence... — creativesoul

I do have concerns here. Is this necessary for the rest of your view? How does it function if unperceived? I'm concerned about the 'thing-in-itself' aporia.

I do agree that an external world is necessary (a feature it seems of human cognition.) But I think making its externality explicit opens it to attacks. Being-with-others and being-in seem primordial to me. Hence the external world.

Remember that distinction between thought/belief and thinking about thought/belief? — creativesoul

Put it in this context for me. (Please.)

One thing that might be clarified is the world this is happening in. Are you taking a metaphysical position? Or is this just the co-perceived world ? Not explicitly defined? What's the rest of your philosophy? For me Mount Everest is out there. It is real. But I don't think the 'external world' can get over-specified without running into old philosophical battles that miss the essence of it as co-perceived --whatever the hell its metaphysical interpretation. (Realism, idealism, etc., etc. I find these battles somewhat hopeless, both sides getting something right, etc.)

Well, I think I see much of what you are saying. And I tend to agree and connect it to some things I've been thinking about.

Language/World???

Never considered it.

I could name of a few different dichotomies than are inherently useless for taking proper account fo that which is both... and is thus... neither. — creativesoul

I mean bodily acts like perception and movement. I chose the wrong word. This goes along in some ways with the image of the coat in the closet. It's not terribly conceptual. It's gather as a unity. That's about it. Otherwise it's a visceral imagining, I think. And I suspect cats and dogs grasp objects like this.

This is more proto-Heidegger.

Feuerbach made his first attempt to challenge prevailing ways of thinking about individuality in his inaugural dissertation, where he presented himself as a defender of speculative philosophy against those critics who claim that human reason is restricted to certain limits beyond which all inquiry is futile, and who accuse speculative philosophers of having transgressed these. This criticism, he argued, presupposes a conception that reason is a cognitive faculty of the individual thinking subject that is employed as an instrument for apprehending truths. He aimed to show that this view of the nature of reason is mistaken, that reason is one and the same in all thinking subjects, that it is universal and infinite, and that thinking (Denken) is not an activity performed by the individual, but rather by “the species” acting through the individual. “In thinking”, Feuerbach wrote, “I am bound together with, or rather, I am one with—indeed, I myself am—all human beings” (GW I:18). — SEP

Looking back, I think this encouraged my holism. Mortals come and go and participate in a form of life, sustaining it with a certain drift, with technology accelerating that drift perhaps. While we are 'literally' in individual bodies and brains, language has a 'feel' as described above. The self is mostly inherited from this form of life. Minor invention does happen, extending the form of life, opening this same invention for those not yet born. Other inventions can mostly die out, perhaps preserved in books for a potential resurrection.

That is where perception does not require being informed by language — creativesoul

I am open to this idea. Indeed, it goes along with my suggestion that the language/world distinction is not sharp.It's also examined in Groundless Grounds (a sort of intelligent direct perception and not the usual concepts glued to sensation.)

Do not conflate our report with what we're reporting upon. The latter is pre-lingul thought/belief and as such it is not existentially dependent upon the former. — creativesoul

For me this gets tricky when we report on the nature of truth for instance. If I associate truth and correspondence, then what is that?