There is a significant element in Hegel regarding time and history. Can that be approached through an enlargement of the general ideas or does the new philosophy introduce incompatible ideas? — Paine

I think Hegel's philosophy of history is really important in its own right - not in relation to Kant only. I've discovered an Hegel scholar called Robert Pippin (read about him here) - although I admit I'll probably never get the book out of the library. At this stage of life, there are only so many authors I can take on. But generally speaking, I understand Hegel is going through a bit of a renaissance, considering writers like the above, and many other commentators. I think it is likely true that Hegel was a genius (notwithstanding Schopenhauer's scorning of him.)

But the theme I keep coming back to is really a very basic one, like Kant 101 - that the mind is not a 'blank slate' upon which experience engraves knowledge, but an active agent that builds its world as it goes.

-----------------------------------------

And, speaking of About Time: this is all from Wayfarer for the immediate future. I'm working on a novel, I'm at around 66k words, but I'm procrastinating, and logging into the Forum every day is splintering my attention. To finish it needs undivided attention for probably the next couple of months. I'm not terminating membership, and I look forward to participation in the future. I've often said, and will say again, I've learned an immense amount from the contributors here, about topics, ideas and philosophers I hadn't even known existed, and I highly value The Philosophy Forum. (Oh, and the novel is in the hard science fiction genre, 'hard' meaning no spaceships or aliens, but a seemingly plausible series of inexplicable events. I'm caling it a 'psi-phi' novel.)

But for now, for that reason, I must suspend my involvement. I will probably not respond to PM's unless from Board Admin (particularly regarding site migration). So bye for the time being, and keep up the great conversations! :heart: :pray:

@Jamal, @Tom Storm, @Banno @Esse Quam Videri , @Astorre, @Joshs, @Corvus, @Janus, @AmadeusD, @Punshhh, @Gnomon, @boundless, @Metaphysician Undercover, @Philosophim (and anyone else interested who's ID I can't bring to mind.)

On the first passage (and leaving aside the digression into his commentary on Plato and Aristotle) - there's still a more 'charitable' reading of the 'in itself' in Kant, which is not so vulnerable to Hegel's criticism (or caricature). As Kant scholar Emrys Westacott says:

Kant's introduced the concept of the “thing in itself” to refer to reality as it is independent of our experience of it and unstructured by our cognitive constitution. The concept was harshly criticized in his own time and has been lambasted by generations of critics since. A standard objection to the notion is that Kant has no business positing it given his insistence that we can only know what lies within the limits of possible experience. But a more sympathetic reading is to see the concept of the “thing in itself” as a sort of placeholder in Kant's system; it both marks the limits of what we can know and expresses a sense of mystery that cannot be dissolved, the sense of mystery that underlies our unanswerable questions. Through both of these functions it serves to keep us humble.

So the in-itself is a boundary, if you like. It’s only when 'the noumenal' or the ding an sich is treated as a 'mysterious unknown thing' that it becomes a reification — a thing about which nothing can be said. ("What is the thing we can't say anything about?") Whereas the appropriate stance is more one of unknowing.

Notice in that passage you quote that 'The Thing-in-itself (and under 'thing' is embraced even Mind and God)...' - this is uttered so casually, as if the manifest nature of both mind and God is something that ought to be obvious to any intelligent observer. But isn't it Hegel who is here introducing the reification ('thingifying') the 'in itself'? 'Nothing you can know so easily' - or rather, think you can know, hence the famous prolixity of Hegel.

(All that said, I don't believe Kant has the "final word" on the limits of knowledge. But it would take us too far afield to begin to consider that topic. Here, in the thread 'About Time', the basis of the argument is simply the ineluctably subjective grounding of time.)

With regards to (3) specifically he (Allison) seems to say that belief in the resurrection is more akin to committing to a total vision of reality or interpreting history through a larger horizon. — Esse Quam Videri

That could be said of practically all of the major religions, couldn’t it? That it doesn’t come down to peer-reviewed evidence, so much as a moral vision of the nature of reality or the meaning of life itself.

I notice in Allison’s book description, “Allison moves on to consider the resurrection in parallel with other traditions and stories, including Tibetan accounts of saintly figures being assumed into the light, in the chapter "Rainbow Body" (‘In Tibetan Buddhism, a supreme state of spiritual realization where an advanced practitioner's physical body transforms into pure light at death, signifying complete enlightenment, often leaving only hair and nails, or even vanishing entirely’). This is something I heard about when a participant in Buddhist forums.

Philosophically speaking, my view is that religions generally are an attempt to communicate insights into such radically different states of being. They are extremely hard to communicate, and rarely understood, hence clothed in symbolic language and mythological allegories (thus also prone to enormous misunderstandings). I also notice in the comments on Allison’s book ‘his willingness to take seriously the reality of religious experience’. Such ‘experiences’ (better, ‘realisations’), do sometimes result in the complete re-orientation of an individual’s sense of what is real. Again, very hard to communicate or describe. (See William James Varieties of Religious Experience for a classic on this.)

(Around the mid 2000’s, an archaeologist made the startling claim that he had discovered an ossuary in Israel that contained the physical remains of Jesus. We had a dinner-table conversation about this news story, during which I said that, were it proven, it would be catastrophic for Christianity, undermining the foundational mythos of the religion. Others at the table were more sanguine, saying that the Resurrection was ‘only symbolic’ and that Christ’s moral commandments and teachings were the real essence. I insisted that to say that, betrays an ignorance of what Christianity means, which provoked a furious row. But I still believe it to be the case. I’ve also found with other family members, that even those who have remained Christian express doubts that the resurrection was literally true, whereas I, who am not a Church-going Christian at all, have no trouble believing that it was, for reasons I can’t really defend. The claim about the ossuary, by the way, was soon dismissed by other archeologists.)

Well, here is an interview featuring both of them, so I might take the time to listen to some or all of it.

I take Levin to be conjecturing that inherent within matter itself is a "space" of possible forms, and a kind of inherent instinctive intelligence and agency that is capable of, to use Whitehead's terminology, "creative advance" whereby novel forms "ingress". The idea is that both living and non-living matter is "organic" or "self-organizing", yet not with any antecedent "purpose" or transcendent mind at work. It certainly seems right to me that there is no strictly mechanical explanation for the mysteries of morphogenesis. — Janus

Yes I meant neo-neo-platonist. Surely there are convergences with Terrence Deacon. The forms can also be understood as constraints or 'forms of possibility'. I mostly have taken in Levin listening to his youtube talks and dialogues.



thank you I will find a quiet minute or 30 to take that in.

Right. It was a pretty dense review, I admit. Of course, I'm highly sympathetic to Levin's neoplatonism, but that critic seemed to have some pretty good points to make about whether his ideas really are able to be validated empirically. (In the book I'm writing, there's a character called Don LeVan who is basically Levin's character.)

The proposition put forward in the OP is that there is "no secular basis for morality."

This implies that all morality grows out of a religious tradition.

No. The morality came first. We evolved the neurological capacities for it. Our evolution as a social species refined it — Questioner

Straight out of the Dawkins Dennett playbook. Evolution displaces religion becuase it's scientific. You clearly haven't understood anything I've said about it, so no use repeating myself.

agree. I find him pretty difficult, although I very much appreciate what he's trying to do, at a high level.

I am not going to try to persuade you that Eric Reitan's blog post is correct. It may well not be! It made interpretive sense to me, that's all.

Surely this passage at least hints at that:

If my understanding of myself is at odds with what I am in myself, Hegel thought this would become apparent as I attempt to be (in practice) what I take myself to be (in theory). There arises a clash between my self-concept and what the self really is, a clash that manifests itself as a “contradiction,” one that then forces a revision in my self-understanding. When I try on this new self-understanding and attempt to live it out, another contradiction emerges. And so on. The resulting “dialectic” (Hegel’s name for this evolutionary process) continues until (at the end of history, so to speak) I finally reach a self-understanding that generates no contradictions when lived out. At that point, the phenomenal self has collapsed into the noumenal self—and I come to see what I am in myself.

According to Hegel’s own developed philosophy, the vision I have of my noumenal self turns out to be not just a vision of one small piece of the noumenal realm, but rather a vision of the Absolute (Hegel’s term for the ultimate noumenal reality).

I only selected that post by Eric Reitan because of its very specific focus on the question of the unknowable nature of the noumenon, and also the unknowable nature of the subject who knows ('mere cognition').

Of course, in a blog post comprising half a dozen paragraphs, nobody is going to capture the massive sweep of Hegel's 'Phenomenology of the Spirit' or his dialectical method.

If all of this (i.e. Kant's argument) is correct, then “ultimate” reality is unknowable. And...this implication of Kant’s thought was not one that others were prepared simply to accept. In the intellectual generation immediately following Kant, there were two towering figures in philosophy and theology who, each in his own way, sought a pathway beyond the wall of unknowability that Kant had erected around the noumenal.

What follows is not intended as a summary of their responses, but mainly to point out that they were reacting against Kant's declaration of the unknowable nature of the in-itself.

If brain capacities are not the result of our evolution, what is your alternative explanation? — Questioner

The question is improperly framed as it presumes that morality can be explained by neurology.

WE learn more about the development of moral codes by studying the development of moral codes than by studying the human brain. . — Ecurb

:ok:

The Immanuel Kant Song

If brain capacities are not the result of our evolution, what is your alternative explanation? — Questioner

The evolution of the h.sapiens brain, along with the the upright gait, opposable thumb, and much else, is one of the most, if not the most, spectacular examples of evolutionary development in the annals of evolution. But whether all of the capabilities that arrive as a consequence can be understood or explained in terms of evolutionary biology is another matter. It's subtly reductionist - it equates human ethical and intellectual abilities with the kinds of adaptive advantages that are provided by claws and teeth. If, as someone asked, reason is a product of natural selection, then how much confidence can we have in a rational argument for natural selection? The power of reason is owed to the independence of reason, and to nothing else. (This observation is the source of a vast amount of literature, by the way.)

So your concern is not that the science may be "right" but that it displaces religion? — Questioner

No, that was not the point. The point was, that it is often treated as a substitute for religion, when it is held up as an explanation for morality or ethics or other distinctively human abilities. I suggest that the appeal to 'evolution as the source of morality' arises from that. But it fails to recognise the differences which arise due to the human capacity for self-reflection, reason, story-telling, invention, science and such capacities. Yes, we evolved to the point where such capacities become available, but whether they can be understood as a result of evolution is another matter.

No, the theory of evolution, which works by natural selection, does what scientific theories do - they provide explanations based on the best available evidence. — Questioner

They certainly do, for the evolution of species.

//see also Michael Ruse, Darwinism as Religion//

the capacities for love, hate, empathy, a sense of fairness, a sense of right and wrong - and the cognition to make decisions - are the drivers of morality - and these capacities evolved through brain evolution — Questioner

Thanks for the elaboration. You acknowledge the importance of factors such as upbringing and culture, which I agree are of fundamental importance. But that is a far cry from acknowleding that evolutionary biology provides the 'building blocks of morality'. And I question whether the biological theory of evolution really does account for those capacities. It is a theory about the origin and evolution of species, and of the traits of species, seen through the perspective of adaptive fitness.

I'm sceptical about the way that evolution is invoked as a kind of catch-all theory of eveything about human nature. But then, the historical circumstances of its discovery were such that it came to fill the cultural vacuum, left by the abandonment of the religious traditions. For some, then, it inherited the mantle as the source or arbiter of values, as it seemed a natural fit. But the theory was never intended as the basis for ethics (or epistemology for that matter.)

Eh. don't see it like that. Did you choose to be born? Do you choose to die? Not everything is of your own choosing.

The religious only follow their god because they so choose. — Banno

My conscience is captive to the word of God. Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me. Amen. — Martin Luther

if we read it as suggesting that the origins of moral behavior may be found in our evolving together as a social species: strength through cooperation, empathy and love. — Tom Storm

Sure, there are those that write on those themes. Ever encountered the 'Third Way' evolutionary theorists? Dennis Noble is a prominent advocate, often debates Dawkins.

in the previous post, I referred to 'relevance realisation' which is some terminology John Vervaeke has introduced into the discussions of cognitive science and ethical orientation. The definition 'is the cognitive capacity of an agent to flexibly generate and adjust representations of its environment to highlight what matters and ignore what does not. It is the core process of identifying, in real-time, which aspects of experience are significant for achieving a specific goal, thus filtering an overwhelming amount of information into a manageable, meaningful world.' I think it goes some way to bridging the is-ought gap. But not all the way.

I will add that people (as distinct from other animals) orient themselves toward truth, meaning, beauty, justice, and integrity even when these conflict with comfort or survival. So whatever 'relevance realisation' ultimately is, it can’t be reduced to biological optimisation alone. There’s a higher-order normative dimension at work in human cognition, due to the very nature of the human condition, as humans alone are able to discern meaning, assign value, and so on.

Which is exactly where philosophy and religion historically enter the frame: they address ultimate questions of meaning, value, life and death — not merely optimisation problems. I agree there’s some truth in the OP's claim that secular culture often provides an insufficient basis for moral deliberation, especially given how much modern philosophy has defined itself in opposition to religious or spiritual traditions, rather than engaging their deeper concerns. (And also that scientific rationalism, alone, is not equipped for this task.)

But that diagnosis easily turns into an evangelical dog-whistle, as we’ve already seen in this thread, and that’s no solution either. The failure of reductive secularism doesn’t license a slide into Christian apologetics or doctrinal authority. The real task is to recover depth without that kind of regression to an imagined superior past.

Yes, I suppose you're right. I did cherry-pick that passage, which was then subjected to the same kind of criticism that I would make of it. Still, worth emphasising in respect of @Questioners claim that

all morality comes from our evolution — Questioner

which passes for popular wisdom in today's culture.

Pure science does not enter the realm of ethics. That is not part of its mandate. — Questioner

So how can it be, then, that

all morality comes from our evolution. — Questioner

?

But that things are indeed arranged in a certain way says nothing about how they ought be arranged. That there are purses tells us nothing about how those purses ought be distributed. That there are puppies tells us nothing about how we ought treat them. — Banno

Isn't this just Hume's is/ought in a nutshell? Descriptive facts about what exists or how things are arranged don’t, by themselves, entail any normative claims about how things ought to be treated or distributed. If you accept that picture of cognition — a value-neutral world first described, and values added later by way of judgement — the gap follows pretty much automatically. Indeed that was a major animating factor of Enlightenment philosophy.

But that framing has been challenged in cognitive science. John Vervaeke, for example, argues that cognition is fundamentally a process of relevance realisation: creatures don’t encounter a neutral inventory of facts and then evaluate them afterwards; the world shows up already structured in terms of salience, affordances, risk, care, and action. Even a germ knows what's bad for it. What counts as “real” for an agent is inseparable from what matters for coping and flourishing.

On that view, there isn’t a clean separation between an “is” that is purely descriptive and an “ought” that is added later. Normativity is already built into how the world is disclosed to living agents. A puppy is not first encountered as a value-free object and only later assigned significance — its vulnerability, responsiveness, and social meaning are part of how it is perceived in the first place. We're hard wired to think baby animals are cute and warrant protection, never mind that there will always be those whose empathy has been short-circuited.

That doesn’t magically solve every ethical question, but it does undermine the idea that the is/ought gap is a deep or inevitable feature of cognition. I think it's very much the product of the emerging Enlightenment mindset.

The "predicament of modernity", the "modern crisis of meaning" is, in my view, the consequence of too many people too readily embracing socialist, liberal, humanist, democratic views, and then realizing the hard way that they can't live holding those views without also becoming miserable, and, more importabntly, without failing in life. — baker

As compared to - what? Traditionalist, conservative, undemocratic, illiberal? I would rather hope that authentic values can be realised without that.

The point of the argument in the original post is an analysis of how philosophical and scientific materialism came to be such a dominant force in globalised Western culture, and it's consequences for the 'meaning crisis'. I'm trying to articulate a very specific process initiated by Descartes' dualism of 'mind and body' and Galileo's separation of 'primary and secondary' qualities. This leads to the self-contradictory conception of the mind as a 'thinking substance', which, when rejected, leaves only the 'extended substance' of matter/energy as the causal basis of manifest reality.

You're correct in saying that all of this is intrinsically bound up with the emergence of liberalism in politics and economics. But this whole complex of views is also now being called into question by many currents and movements within Western liberal democracies themselves. Accordingly the dominance of materialism can no longer be assumed. People are exploring or re-exploring all manner of philosophical ideas and value systems outside the bounds of Western liberal democracy without however having to literally overthrow it.

I happened upon a sceptical analysis of Michael Levin on Medium - i think you can access it, it opens OK for me in a clean browser. The author says he is PhD, complex systems, physics, CS, maths and philosophy. Interestingly, the critique was developed as a dialogue with Google Gemini. Where I think it's relevant, is in identifying the kind of push back Levin's Platonist ideas will get from other philosophers of biology.

https://medium.com/@AIchats/michael-levins-platonic-biology-fcadcb67c3bf

Another passage from the Transcendental Aesthetic:

We have therefore wanted to say that all our intuition is nothing but the representation of appearance; that the things that we intuit are not in themselves what we intuit them to be, nor are their relations so constituted in themselves as they appear to us; and that if we remove our own subject or even only the subjective constitution of the senses in general, then all constitution, all relations of objects in space and time, indeed space and time themselves, would disappear, and as appearances they cannot exist in themselves, but only in us. What may be the case with objects in themselves and abstracted from all this receptivity of our sensibility remains entirely unknown to us. We are acquainted with nothing except our way of perceiving them, which is peculiar to us and does not necessarily pertain to every being, though to be sure it pertains to every human being. — General Remarks on the Transcendental Aesthetic

Notes:

•“Aesthetic” in contemporary usage usually refers to beauty or artistic appreciation. In Kant, it simply means what pertains to sensibility or sense-perception (from aisthēsis), as distinct from logic. Aesthetic concerns how things are given to us in experience; logic concerns how we think about what is given.

• Note here the centrality of the subject (nowadays often referred to as “the observer”). This passage makes very explicit the constitutive role of the subject in the form of experience — arguably one of the most radical passages in the Critique.

• “Objects in themselves” are said to be entirely unknown to us. This is not to say that they cease to exist, but that whatever kind of existence they may have independently of our mode of cognition is inaccessible to us.

• Finally, note the qualification “every human being.” Kant allows for the possibility that other kinds of beings might have different forms of cognition, and elsewhere he speculates about what a divine intellect might be like. It does give a hint of the breadth of his considerations (elaborated at greater length in some of his other works).

When are the US media going to start talking about a ‘rogue President’? Because that’s what they have. This latest social media barrage - announcing huge public policy changes through his own social media platform for heaven’s sake - about putting punitive tariffs on Europe to force their hand on Greenland. It’s a total outrage. Again, where is Congress? Trump is plainly a narcissistic megalomaniac who has no sense of convention, propriety, or ethics, beyond his own massive ego. It’s often been said that he’s put a ‘wrecking ball’ through all kinds of things - higher education, public science, American diplomacy, responsible economics. You wonder what will be left if the demolition crew is ever stopped.

Although it should be noted at least some Republicans in Congress are speaking out against this lunatic scheme.

Representative Don Bacon, Republican of Nebraska, said in a social media post that the move was “foolish policy” and he likened it to something President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia would do. He added in an interview with CNN, “I feel like it’s incumbent on folks like me to speak up and say these threats and bullying of an ally are wrong.”

He also predicted that if Mr. Trump used military force to seize Greenland, the president would lose significant support from his own base. “Just on the weird chance that he’s serious about invading Greenland, I want to let him know it’ll probably be the end of his presidency,” he said. “Most Republicans know this is immoral and wrong and we’re going to stand up against it.”

….Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina, wrote on social media on Saturday that the new tariffs were “bad for America, bad for American businesses, and bad for America’s allies. It’s great for Putin, Xi and other adversaries who want to see NATO divided.”

He added that the continued coercion “to seize territory of an ally is beyond stupid” and that it “hurts the legacy of President Trump and undercuts all the work he has done to strengthen the NATO alliance over the years.”

Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, called the new tariffs in a social media post “unnecessary, punitive, and a profound mistake” that would only “push our core European allies further away while doing nothing to advance U.S. national security.” — NY Times

Perhaps next time he’s impeached, Republicans will actually finish the process.

Wrong. It's absolutely central. Buddhism stands and falls with kamma and rebirth. — baker

I understand that perfectly well. It’s more like, ‘don’t let ideas about reincarnation stop you from understanding Buddhism better’. As regards ‘supernatural’, I often point out that one of the traditional epithets of the Buddha is ‘lokuttara’ meaning ‘above the world’. The core of Buddhism is world-transcending, although again it means something different in Buddhist cultures, because the battle lines between ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’ aren’t drawn in the same way (or never were drawn.)

Within the Indian traditions the self can be known. — Punshhh

Capital ‘S’ Self. Which is the entire aim of the path. There’s nothing really corresponding with that in Western culture save as a kind of import from Indian sources. Which is not to imply disrespect but mindfulness of context.

*

The point is that all morality comes from our evolution. — Questioner

I very much hope that we don’t revert to the idea of survival of the fittest in planning our politics and our values and our way of life. I have often said that I am a passionate Darwinian when it comes to explaining why we exist. It’s undoubtedly the reason why we’re here and why all living things are here. But to live our lives in a Darwinian way, to make a society a Darwinian society, that would be a very unpleasant sort of society in which to live. It would be a sort of Thatcherite society and we want to – I mean, in a way, I feel that one of the reasons for learning about Darwinian evolution is as an object lesson in how not to set up our values and social lives. — Richard Dawkins, in response to a question about whether survival of the fittest might serve as a basis for values

Dawkins often expresses this sentiment. It is one of the things I find agreeable in his public utterances.

Also, from Richard Polt, a Heidegger scholar:

I have no beef with entomology or evolution, but I refuse to admit that they teach me much about ethics. Consider the fact that human action ranges to the extremes. People can perform extraordinary acts of altruism, including kindness toward other species — or they can utterly fail to be altruistic, even toward their own children. So whatever tendencies we may have inherited leave ample room for variation; our choices will determine which end of the spectrum we approach. This is where ethical discourse comes in — not in explaining how we’re “built,” but in deliberating on our own future acts. Should I cheat on this test? Should I give this stranger a ride? Knowing how my selfish and altruistic feelings evolved doesn’t help me decide at all. Most, though not all, moral codes advise me to cultivate altruism. But since the human race has evolved to be capable of a wide range of both selfish and altruistic behavior, there is no reason to say that altruism is superior to selfishness in any biological sense.

In fact, the very idea of an “ought” is foreign to evolutionary theory. It makes no sense for a biologist to say that some particular animal should be more cooperative, much less to claim that an entire species ought to aim for some degree of altruism. If we decide that we should neither “dissolve society” through extreme selfishness....nor become “angelic robots” like ants, we are making an ethical judgment, not a biological one. Likewise, from a biological perspective it has no significance to claim that Ishould be more generous than I usually am, or that a tyrant ought to be deposed and tried. In short, a purely evolutionary ethics makes ethical discourse meaningless. — Anything but Human

The passage from Eric Reitan that I had in mind was this:

(Hegel) thought that Kant had missed something important—namely, that the self which experiences the world is also a part of the world it is experiencing. Rather than there being this sharp divide between the experiencing subject and things-in-themselves, with phenomena emerging at the point of interface, the experiencing subject is a thing-in-itself. It is one of the noumena—or, put another way, the self that experiences the world is part of the ultimate reality that lies behind experience.

So: the self that has experiences is a noumenal reality. ...Hegel believed that this fact could be made use of, so that somehow the self could serve as a wedge to pry open a doorway through the wall of mystery, into an understanding of reality as it is in itself.

But this understanding couldn’t be achieved by simply turning our attention on ourselves. As soon as we do that we’ve made ourselves into an object of experience, and this object is just as likely to be the product of our own cognitive reconstructions as any other object. In other words, what we are presented with when we investigate ourselves introspectively is the phenomenal self, not the noumenal self. The self as it appears to itself may be radically unlike the self as it is in itself. ... — Eric Reitan

The point I'm trying to bring out, is the elusive nature of the self (or subject). I often return to the idea found in Indian philosophy (and hardly elsewhere) that 'the eye can see another, but not itself'. This conveys the idea that the knower or subject cannot know itself, paradoxical though that might seem. Kant's insistence on the 'mere' acts of cognition makes a similar point, although expressed differently. But he is arguing that we can't make out the knower or subject as any kind of knowable entity or object, even though it invariably accompanies every act of thought.

The point which Reitan goes on to make is that both Hegel and Schleirmacher say that though we can't know the self as such, because we are the self, so this fact of our identity as the self could 'serve as a wedge to pry open a doorway'. But then, considering the great complexity (not to say prolixity) of Hegel's philosophy, this is not simple or straightforward.

But if nothing changed at all in the world, would anyone perceive time? The fact of the matter is, things change (e.g. Sun rises every morning), hence people notice time passing. — Corvus

What Kant means by pure intuition is likely not what you think it means. Pure intuition is the a priori (already existing) form of sensibility (sensory cognition) through which anything can appear to us at all, independent of any particular sensory content (i.e. irrespective of what it is.)

But here, 'form' is also not what you might take it to be. It does not mean a kind of internal template or mental container that sensations enter into. Kant is referring to the necessary condition of appearance — the way anything must be given in order to be experienced at all. Things must appear in space and time if they are to appear at all. And space and time are not objects we perceive, nor features abstracted from experience, but the already-existing field within which perception occurs.

If you find that hard to understand, you’re not alone. These are among the foundational moves in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, which while a great work, is also acknowledged by everyone, a very difficult book to read and interpret.

The way I put it — and this is my gloss on Kant — is that while time is objectively measurable (which Kant does not dispute), it is grounded in the faculty of knowledge itself rather than in the objective domain as such. So your remarks about time being objective are broadly correct, but its objectivity is not really the point at issue. The deeper question is: in what sense would time exist absent any awareness of it? The difficulty is that as soon as you begin to think about that question, you are already bringing time into awareness, or rather, bringing your mind to bear on the question. So time is always already part of the consideration.

Have another look at the original post, particular the section 'what is not at issue'. You will see that it is not the intention to deny the objective reality of time. Rather it is the constituents of objectivity that are in question.

But what's so galling is the casual way Trump has brushed off any legitimacy of her claim to be the rightful president of Venezeula, 'because the people don't like her.' When it is common knowledge that Maduro lost and stole the last election. But then, losing and then stealing an election is all part of the Trump playbook, right? Probably it means the current regime is more tractable to bribery and coercion, which is why Trump wants to keep them. The whole thing is a disgusting cesspit of robber-baron colonialism.

The point being that Energy is an Idea (mental inference), not a real thing (physical observation) — Gnomon

This is simply mistaken. Drop that phrase into Google Gemini and see what comes back. No amount of verbalisation is going to alter the facts.

I know the term ‘transpersonal’ used to be associated with Wilbur, but he stopped using it and it generally fell out of use in the 1990s. But I think it conveys the drift of the transcendental subject quite well - ‘those capacities and faculties which characterise any rational sentient being, not this or that person’. I haven’t noticed anything in Bitbol about ‘mystical experience’ and mystical experience is not a term I’m inclined to use in the context of his material.

It's more that you seem to deplore modernity, see it as a step backwards somehow — Janus

Generally not, except in this specific regard. The solution surely comprises recognizing it. At least that is a starting point.

the physical is not merely mechanical and mindless as has been assumed by the scientific orthodoxy. — Janus

My point exactly!

The problem, though, is always going to be finding clear evidence for such a thing, and being able to develop a clear model of just what might be going on — "Janus

Evidence and models are again appeals to empiricism, don’t you see? Not all philosophical analyses can be expressed in those terms.

As for whether there is a ‘crisis of meaning’ I think it’s axiomatic, but I wouldn’t want try and persuade those who don’t agree.

As it is the basic argument of this thread has a clear provenance in the sources quoted.

She is ready to drop off many of her things just to finally start addressing and solving the big social issues of Venezuela. — javi2541997

True. No slight on her. But then Trump is like ‘thanks lady, now go away.’ I bet the Nobel Committee is less than impressed.

So the Orange Emperor is gifted a Nobel Peace Prize medal by Maria Corina Machado, leader of the Venezuelan opposition, which had been awarded to her. Never mind that the Committee says that in no way such honours can be transferred! The Emperor will grasp the opportunity. Even though he’s basically disenfranchised Machado after snatching Maduro, declaring that she ‘lacks popular support’. (Oh well, I guess he’s saved the Venezuelans the trouble of having an election as he obviously knows ‘the will of the people’ better than they themselves.)

But what an unbelievably gauche and classless gesture, accepting someone else’s Nobel. With Trump, there’s never any bottom.

:pray: Someone I'm meaning to study. I've only ever read his obituary.

Fair enough. I'd go along with that. But I've got a more specific focus in mind. (I meant by the 'italicized pargraphs' the post directly above your last post, which re-states the thrust of the OP.)

I've gone back and looked at your initial comment in this thread, so I offer the following retrospective response.

I take Wayfarer to mean we are adrift from a culturally imposed overarching purpose. Such overarching purposes were imposed by political elites who throughout most of history were the only literate members of societies. The oppressed illiterate masses had no choice but to at least pay lip service to the imposed values and meanings. To what extent they were genuinely interested in, or were privately opposed to, these impositions remains, and will remain, unknown, precisely because they were illiterate. — Janus

I take this to imply that the hidden purpose of my argument is to 'restore the ancient order'- harking back to some supposed 'higher knowledge' which was imposed on the masses by the aristocracy and the Church ('political elites'.) This is the way you often intepret my posts, and I can sort of understand why. After all the so-called 'perennialists' who invoke the 'wisdom traditions' are often political reactionaries. So this kind of analysis can easily be associated with them. But, not my intent. I think I'm fully cognizant of the way that the knowledge we have now prevents any kind of return to a traditionalist mindset. Yet at the same time, those perennial philosophies must still remain perennial (otherwise, they never were!)

And also, it is true that Biblical narratives provided an historical framework which could be interpreted as an imposed political order and hence an imposed 'purpose'. indeed the European Enlightenment was largely inspired as a means to throw of the 'ancien regime' and ending of our self-imposed tutelage (Kant). This has obviously been hugely beneficial in many ways - in that sense, I'm very much a progressive liberal. But at the same time, it has its shadow. And the shadow is precisely the sense of being cast adrift in a meaningless cosmos, the children of chance and necessity, with only our own wits and purposes set against the 'appalling vastnesses of space' (Pascal). That's nearer to what I mean by the 'predicament of modernity'. The resulting idea that 'the universe is meaningless' is very much the product of that mindset. It comes directly from the 'Cartesian Division' that was mapped out in the OP. And yet, it remains a kind of cultural default for much of the secular intelligentsia. That is Vervaeke's 'meaning crisis' in a nutshell.

So I am reacting against the physicalist view, yes. The view that what is real, are the entities describable in terms of physics, and that life and mind are products of, or emerge from, that. If you see the way the division or duality was set up in the first place, then you can see how it is a picture based on an abstraction. That is what this thread is about.

Great! Thanks for that clarification.

You fail to realize it (physicalism) is self-contradictory only on the the assumptions, the strictures, that you place on it. — Janus

Well, they're spelled out in the two italicized paragraphs above. What I'm arguing is that physicalism in its modern form, arose as a consequence of the Galilean and Cartesian divisions between mind and matter, between primary and secondary qualities, and so on. This thesis has been explored in detail in those sources I provided, amongst many others (i.e. Whitehead's 'bifurcation of nature'.) So if you think that is overall mistaken, then how so?

then accuse others who don't agree with your dogmatic strictures of being positivists. — Janus

The only reason I have said that some of your posts are 'positivist', is when they clearly are. Not all the time, but also not infrequently.

Positivism is a philosophy asserting that genuine knowledge comes only from sensory experience and logical/mathematical analysis, emphasizing scientific methods, objective facts, and observable phenomena while rejecting metaphysics, intuition, or faith as sources of truth.

You might explain what about that definition you disagree with.

The 'tendentiously monolithic history of ideas' is summed up in these paragraphs, and is supported by the references provided.

Descartes systematised what Galileo had begun. Taking the measurable world as the paradigm of objective knowledge, he posited a strict ontological division between res extensa—the extended, mechanical substance of nature—and res cogitans—the unextended, thinking substance of the mind. This dualism safeguarded human subjectivity from the reductionism of mechanism, yet it did so at the cost of severing mind from world. Thought was now a private interior realm looking out upon an inert, external nature. The result was a self-conscious spectator of a disenchanted universe: the modern subject—liberated from dogma yet exiled from a cosmos stripped of inherent meaning.

The Cartesian worldview soon became the framework of modern science. Its success lay in treating the natural world as a closed system of mechanical causes, perfectly describable in mathematical terms and open to experimental verification. By excluding subjective and qualitative dimensions from its domain, science achieved unprecedented predictive power and technological mastery. Yet this very exclusion became an implicit metaphysic: reality was equated with what could be measured, while everything else—value, purpose, consciousness—was deemed epiphenomenal, a by-product of the essentially purposeless motions of matter. Thus the Galilean and Cartesian divisions were no longer simply methodological but ontological, shaping the modern sense of the meaning of being. We're all inheritors of those ways of thinking, whether aware of it or not.

Refs: Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences; Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (2012); Michel Henry, Barbarism (1987).

And it's a perfectly defensible historical analysis.

I think of myself, in behalf of a possible experience, by abstracting from all actual experience, and from this conclude that I could become conscious of my existence even outside experience and of its empirical conditions. Consequently I confuse the possible abstraction from my empirically determined existence with the supposed consciousness of a separate possible existence of my thinking Self, and believe that I cognize what is substantial in me as a transcendental subject, since I have in thought merely the unity of consciousness that grounds everything determinate as the mere form of cognition. — ibid. B426

Again, a very useful passage, in terms of understanding Kant's view of the matter, and thanks for it.

The repeated use of “mere” and “merely” in that sentence really caught my eye — they’re doing a lot of work.

Kant isn’t just describing the unity of consciousness, he’s also putting a fence around how we’re allowed to think about it. What he’s warning against is a very natural slide: we abstract in thought from all particular experiences, and then quietly slip into thinking that the “I” could exist on its own, as a separate kind of entity altogether outside experience.

So when he says that what we really have is “merely the unity of consciousness” and “the mere form of cognition,” the point isn’t that it’s trivial or unimportant. It’s that it isn’t substantia — a thing or an entity in its own right. It’s a formal condition: the structural unity that makes determinate experience and judgement possible at all. The “mere” is there to stop us reifying it into a metaphysical self or soul.

At the same time, though, this “mere form of cognition” is doing incredibly deep work. Literally pivotal. It’s what makes any experience hang together as experience in the first place. Without it, nothing could count as an object for a subject, and nothing could really be judged or known. So the language feels a bit defensive. In the effort to avoid dogmatic metaphysics, he risks slipping into dogma of another kind.

Which leaves an interesting tension. On the one hand, he insists it’s only formal. On the other hand, it’s the most basic enabling condition of intelligibility that we ever encounter. You can’t help wondering whether it’s really “mere” in any innocent sense — or whether Kant is deliberately bracketing off a deeper way of understanding it in order to avoid drifting back into old-style metaphysics. I think in this vital respect he is leaning too far towards empiricism.

It's also the very point which his later critics (even his friendly critics) used to pry open the 'door to the noumenal' (see this blog post.)

@boundless - I think this might echo some of your concerns.

There'll be no hats. :yikes:

Anyway - my basic point is still, there's an awful lot of basic stuff that needs doing here on Earth, before 'fixing our gaze on distant worlds'.