Your point is well taken that what Spinoza was saying by "substance" cannot be easily associated with contemporary meanings. I am only adding the observation that his idea was also at odds with his contemporaries, including a certain guy from France. I read Spinoza as also directly challenging Anselm in regards to "what can be conceived." I will save that argument for another day.

Neo-platonism is very much concerned with that. So too were the gnostics, although as you say, Plotinus was critical of them, but from our perspective both sides might seem to have much more in common than either of them do with us today. — Wayfarer

For sure. And I brought up Spinoza partly because he is part of the exclusion or prison escape you are talking about. Not because he shares something essential to the the others that I could prove as a matter of principle.
It is more along the lines of checking out who Dante put in the pagan lobby in the Inferno. Nice crowd.

I understand the limitations of your regard regarding Schumacher. It is similar to my regard for Ivan Illich. I don't agree with Illich for many particular reasons (maybe most of them) but love him for what he took upon himself to struggle with.

In case this gets missed (and because I already typed it up), here IMV is one approach to the matter of philosophy, connected naturally to my posts above. To contextualize the first part, it addresses how (if at all) we can theorize life without betraying its flow or facticity or pre-theoretical is-ness. Despite the seeming impossibility of such a task, such a task is made possible by the inherent meaning-making structure of life, which the right kind of theory can immerse itself in sincerely in a kind of submission.

Since the grasp of concepts intercept life and 'still the stream,' phenomenology must find less intrusive, more natural ways to get a grip on its subject matter, which remain in accord with 'the immanent historicity of life in itself.'
...
It involves a phenomenological modification of traditional formalization in order to efface its proclivity toward diremption. All formally indicative concepts aim, strictly speaking, to express only the pure 'out toward' without any further content or ontic fulfillment.
...
The conceptual pair motive-tendency (later the pair thrownness-project understood as equiprimordial) is not a duality, but rather the 'motivated tendency' or the 'tending motivation' in which the 'outworlding' of life expresses itself. Expression, articulation, differentiation arises out of a core of indifferentiation which is no longer to be understood in terms of subject-object, form-matter, or any other duality.
...
Experienced experience, this streaming return of life back upon itself, is precisely the immanent historicity of life, a certain familiarity or 'understanding' that life already has with itself and that phenomenological intuition must simply 'repeat.' And what is this understanding, whether implicit or methodologically explicit, given to understand? The articulations of life itself, which accrue to the self-experience that occurs in the 'dialectical' return of experiencing life to already experienced life...Once again, life is not mute but meaningful, it 'expresses' itself precisely in and through its self-experience and spontaneous self-understanding.
...
The full historical I finds itself caught up in meaningful contexts so that it oscillates according to the rhythmics of worlding, it properizes itself to the articulations of an experience which is governed by the immanent historicity of life in itself. For the primal It of the life stream is more than the primal I. It is the self experiencing itself experiencing the worldly. The ultimate source of the deep hermeneutics of life is properly an irreducible 'It' that precedes and enables the I. It is the unity and whole of the 'sphere of experience' understood as a self-sufficient domain of meaning that phenomenology seeks to approach, 'understandingly experience,' and bring to appropriate language. — Kiesel interpreting/translating Heidegger in 1919

It could be demonstrated with reference to the texts - that’s what I tried to do with those two quotes from Gerson and Feser. I’ve read some books on the idea, but it’s hard to explain.
— Wayfarer

Not to be difficult, but anything less than direct experience would seem to be a talking about what is finally not understood, a difference as difference without further specification. — macrosoft

Here it is again:

Consider that when you think about triangularity, as you might when proving a geometrical theorem, it is necessarily perfect triangularity that you are contemplating, not some mere approximation of it. Triangularity as your intellect grasps it is entirely determinate or exact; for example, what you grasp is the notion of a closed plane figure with three perfectly straight sides, rather than that of something which may or may not have straight sides or which may or may not be closed. Of course, your mental image of a triangle might not be exact, but rather indeterminate and fuzzy. But to grasp something with the intellect is not the same as to form a mental image of it. For any mental image of a triangle is necessarily going to be of an isosceles triangle specifically, or of a scalene one, or an equilateral one; but the concept of triangularity that your intellect grasps applies to all triangles alike. Any mental image of a triangle is going to have certain features, such as a particular color, that are no part of the concept of triangularity in general. A mental image is something private and subjective, while the concept of triangularity is objective and grasped by many minds at once.

I bolded the last, because it’s key to the point. I think that we nowadays instinctively understand the nature of such things in terms of ‘what brains do’. But

Physics is the question of what matter is. Metaphysics is the question of what is ultimately real. People of a rational, scientific bent tend to think that the two are coextensive—that everything is physical. Many who think differently are inspired by religion to posit the existence of God and souls; Nagel affirms that he’s an atheist, but he also asserts that there’s an entirely different realm of non-physical stuff that exists—namely, mental stuff. The vast flow of perceptions, ideas, and emotions that arise in each human mind is something that, in his view, actually exists as something other than merely the electrical firings in the brain that gives rise to them—and exists as surely as a brain, a chair, an atom, or a gamma ray.

In other words, even if it were possible to map out the exact pattern of brain waves that give rise to a person’s momentary complex of awareness, that mapping would only explain the physical correlate of these experiences, but it wouldn’t be them. A person doesn’t experience patterns, and her experiences are as irreducibly real as her brain waves are, and different from them.

Thoughts are Real

Platonic idealism basically affirms that ideas are real - not only by virtue of their being in individual minds. But of course the immediate objection to that - one that Plato himself didn’t have an answer for - is ‘where or in what sense do they exist?’ What I argue is that they precede and inform existence; that they subsist at a different level to phenomenal objects. Russell says:

Consider such a proposition as 'Edinburgh is north of London'. Here we have a relation between two places, and it seems plain that the relation subsists independently of our knowledge of it. When we come to know that Edinburgh is north of London, we come to know something which has to do only with Edinburgh and London: we do not cause the truth of the proposition by coming to know it, on the contrary we merely apprehend a fact which was there before we knew it. The part of the earth's surface where Edinburgh stands would be north of the part where London stands, even if there were no human being to know about north and south, and even if there were no minds at all in the universe. This is, of course, denied by many philosophers, either for Berkeley's reasons or for Kant's. But we have already considered these reasons, and decided that they are inadequate. We may therefore now assume it to be true that nothing mental is presupposed in the fact that Edinburgh is north of London. But this fact involves the relation 'north of', which is a universal; and it would be impossible for the whole fact to involve nothing mental if the relation 'north of', which is a constituent part of the fact, did involve anything mental. Hence we must admit that the relation, like the terms it relates, is not dependent upon thought, but belongs to the independent world which thought apprehends but does not create. 1 .

So the view that I am developing is that universals in this sense, are constitutive of our experience and knowledge of the world. They provide the conceptual foundations of reason itself. But since the advent of nominalism, this is no longer understood; instead, reason is seen in Darwinian terms, as an adaptation. And that is where my other pinned article comes in, Maritain’s criticism of empiricism. But that is more than enough for one post.

I think maybe you are misunderstanding me. IMV, thoughts are extremely real, even perhaps the essence of the human as human. I've been harping on the field of meaning for awhile.

IMV, the triangular argument doesn't get us beyond inter-subjectivity. I agree that we have some sort of geometric and numerical intuition. My point is that this intuition is just there for investigation. Is it just what brains do? I don't know. How do we see around our own cognition to check? My default position on this is quasi-Kantian. The universality of such intuitions suggests that they just come included with human cognition in general. That this is connected to the brain is of course highly plausible. But for me the brain issue is not central, since I think the denial of consciousness is simply absurd.

It seems that our views overlap in some important ways (the objection that philosophy be scientism). On the other hand, I have the sense that you prefer something beyond or behind experience (?). When you quoted Wittgenstein, I initially interpreted you in terms of doing so along my own lines. Now that seems unlikely. Correct me if I am wrong here. For me the revelation of the mystery is itself the thing. I'm not sure, but I get the impression that you may be working from the sense that revealing the mystery is only a clearing to answer that mystery. In other words, the mystery (that there is a meaningful world) only serves to indicate the limitations of physical science and not some other, higher science (metaphysics.)

I welcome that. It is philosophy that aspires to the heights. In my lingo, that would be a kind of positive theology. Not that it has to by any means, but it doesn't speak to me like the open space of the question. The question is under erasure because it seeks for a ground, and yet the ground it seeks must be a groundless ground or yet one more object in the field to be grounded. IMV, it's the human abliity to get behind this nexus as a whole that constitutes transcendence. To perceive groundlessness is to be struck with wonder and/or terror. We are thrown back on our own mortal meaning-making in the space of the mystery.

In contrast, I think your view (?) involves the grasping of particular ideas? The grasping of a true ground that is not also an abyss? I do hope I don't offend you by coming out and saying so shamelessly how I see things. They say to never talk religion or politics. I can give up politics, but philosophy/religion is just too much keep down.

Sorry didn’t reply previously, I’m working a contract right now and snatching opportunities to write here and there. I was going to mention a useful essay, 17th Century Theories of Substance, which I have found very useful in this context.

IMV, thoughts are extremely real, even perhaps the essence of the human as human. I've been harping on the field of meaning for awhile. — macrosoft

Sure, but real in what sense? The example of a triangle is trite, but it’s just an illustration of a broader principle. What’s at stake is the ontology of ideas in a general sense. You see, I think modern culture generally has a sense that the nature of ideas, and, as you say, the ground of meaning, can be understood through the perspective of biology and neurology. Not saying you believe that, you obviously don’t, but I would think it’s the consensus view. Challenging that view is what Nagel was pilloried over. (I don’t know if I mentioned Meaning and the Problem of Universals by Kelly Ross, but he talks about exactly the link between universals and meaning.)

Of course the ability to think and abstract is inextricably connected with the brain, insofar as it is the advanced hominid forebrain that enables it. But my argument is that the advent of language, reasoning, and myth-making, is precisely where h. Sapiens transcends the (merely) biological. And that is in large part because she is able to intuit that which is *not* simply the product of chance and necessity.

Regarding Wittgenstein, I think that positivism routinely misinterpreted him. When he ended his masterwork with ‘that of which we cannot speak’, he wasn’t saying, like Carnap and Ayer said, that metaphysics is merely nonsensical or ‘otiose’ (one of Ayer’s favourite words). It’s simply that it concerns subjects which can’t be meaningfully conveyed through discursive thought. But for anyone who has become familiar with Eastern non-dualism, that is hardly a radical idea. (Again, this is the sense in which W. is sometimes compared to Buddhism.) But I think the thrust of the work was to ‘take you to the border’ as it were, so as to sense the vastness beyond.

I do hope I don’t offend you.... — macrosoft

Your posts are a model of courtesy.


And, my train is about to arrive......

Can you live without a dictionary ?? — hks

Can you? :chin: :chin: :chin:

Neither God nor Aristotle wrote your dictionary. You need to think for yourself. Not simply regurgitate your dictionary.

Regarding the IEP article, it does a good job of describing the differences between how substance is described in Spinoza and Descartes but doesn't reflect Spinoza's emphasis on our limits to explain causes or investigate them.
I will look for a short bit of Spinoza that touches upon this.

Referring to a dictionary may be ok for an ordinary Joe Blow or Jane Row but for anyone claiming to be a philosopher it is merely a populorum fallacy.

Neither God nor Aristotle wrote your dictionary. You need to think for yourself. Not simply regurgitate your dictionary. — hks

I posted one dictionary definition, along with a number of poster's' definitions, to show that we don't agree on a definition. I don't think I have referred to God or Aristotle at all, have I? :chin: What's your issue?

Referring to a dictionary may be ok for an ordinary Joe Blow or Jane Row but for anyone claiming to be a philosopher it is merely a populorum fallacy. — hks

A dictionary definition is often a convenient starting point. It's no more than that, and philosophers often need a bit more than this simple convenience. But is that any reason to get sniffy about dictionaries? I don't think so.

Exactly! Thank you.

Sure, but real in what sense? — Wayfarer

An excellent question, and that is where meaning holism comes in. All I can possibly offer you is just more words. And how are those words intended exactly? For me this holism angle is crucial. Most philosophy has been trying to concentrate all meaning into a few words. Some basic set of words say what is really there. But what is really there is largely just this very saying, just this questioning. Reality is self-questioning. Reality is made of questions. Holy cow, I never thought of it just that way, though that has been implicit. I think this is Hegel meant. The dialectical process is chasing for the real that lives beyond it. At some point BANG! it realizes that it is and has been the intelligible structure of a self-exploring self-interpreting substance-subject worldling. Reality is made of questions, and theology itself is God. Is that the final name? I can't claim that. I do think this position is a few rungs up the ladder of self-consciousness. Is this the ladder to climb? It has always just felt right to me.

Philosophy wants to know what philosophy is. 'What is this, this philosophy?' Reality, through us, wants to know what's real. And there it is: reality is that which wants to know what's real. This brings in the future, the unknown. Perhaps the space is held open by our questioning. We temporarily sink to animal immersion in the business of practical life now and then. We forget we are there. We are the-washing-of-dishes, the-editing-of-emails.

You see, I think modern culture generally has a sense that the nature of ideas, and, as you say, the ground of meaning, can be understood through the perspective of biology and neurology. — Wayfarer

I do see that lots of intellectuals think that, but they tend to be on the hard science side. Maybe a large number of ordinary folks treat them with reverence, seduced by gadgets, not realizing the leap from gadget making to philosophy. And definitely there is a common-sense vague Darwinism out their in terms of explaining behavior. Biology is one of my weaker subjects, so I am tuned in to this vague common sense. Fortunately I have scientific training elsewhere, so I am aware of how lazy my grasp is. Anyway, our self-image is in a weird place right now as a species. Our biologists talk a lingo right out of Mein Kampf (to wildly exaggerate for effect) and our politicians are as 'sensitive' as can be. Are we just codes that want to replicate who mistakenly think we exist? Then TV and literature sends another message --at its best a more honest message. Fiction just emphasizes our situation, intensifies it, mirrors it back to us along with interpretations of what we are in their tangled and combative plurality.

Of course the ability to think and abstract is inextricably connected with the brain, insofar as it is the advanced hominid forebrain that enables it. But my argument is that the advent of language, reasoning, and myth-making, is precisely where h. Sapiens transcends the (merely) biological. And that is in large part because she is able to intuit that which is *not* simply the product of chance and necessity. — Wayfarer

I am quite open to this view. That's why I object to the monkey talk as not 'realistic' talk but a metaphysical talk posing as science. We have the same animal foundations as the chimp, etc., but I agree that the cultural realm stands above all that. I am weak in biology, but I find it very unlikely that biology concerns itself much with the realm of meaning. It's strange that this highest realm is also so elusive with respect to our most practically effective form of knowledge. On the other hand, science starts with the de-worlded a-historical subject. To be a scientist is (seemingly) switch into a mode where all meaning is purely formal and quantitative. Both Hegel and Heidegger talked about this most certain science (math) also being the easiest, since it can be made perfectly explicit. Even a dead computer can check a proof.

Regarding Wittgenstein, I think that positivism routinely misinterpreted him. When he ended his masterwork with ‘that of which we cannot speak’, he wasn’t saying, like Carnap and Ayer said, that metaphysics is merely nonsensical or ‘otiose’ (one of Ayer’s favourite words). It’s simply that it concerns subjects which can’t be meaningfully conveyed through discursive thought. But for anyone who has become familiar with Eastern non-dualism, that is hardly a radical idea. (Again, this is the sense in which W. is sometimes compared to Buddhism.) But I think the thrust of the work was to ‘take you to the border’ as it were, so as to sense the vastness beyond. — Wayfarer

I agree that they misinterpreted him. But I think Carnap had to have seen some weirdness and still couldn't help being impressed, which does credit to Carnap as a human being responding against his own ideology to sincere inquiry. DIdn't W read some kind of famous mystical writing to the circle? So they figured it out at some point. Their hero was not exactly on their team.

I agree also about this 'vastness of the beyond.' And I agree that what is pointed at is non-linguistic. As W said, questions exist only where an answer is possible. As I read it, it is in really questioning the questioning that we discover a lyrical cry of wonder. We can't ask for the source or meaning of the whole. It is not an intelligible question. Explanation is only 'between' objects within the space of meaning as a whole. By definition there is nothing beyond the whole, nothing to put it in relation to. If hidden entities are invoked, we have merely expanded our notion of the whole. For instance, angels would be one more kind of being that we could talk about. Traditional notions of God offer also just one more object to be explained. Physical theories of everything become themselves brute facts.

The whole modern conception of the world is founded on the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena.
...

The contemplation of the world sub specie aeterni is its contemplation as a limited whole.

Feeling the world as a limited whole—it is this that is mystical.

For an answer which cannot be expressed the question too cannot be expressed. When the answer cannot be put into words, neither can the question be put into words.

The riddle does not exist.

If a question can be put at all, then it can also be answered.

...
We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all. Of course there is then no question left, and just this is the answer.
...
The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of this problem. The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem.

Is not this the reason why men to whom after long doubting the sense of life became clear, could not then say wherein this sense consisted?)

There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical.
— W

Clearly we all find what appeals to us in text. As I mentioned before, I had an intense 'vision of contigency' as a teenager. I had grandma's old typewriter and laid out my own amatuer TLP on some fancy paper from Walmart. 'Color is a miracle. Space is a miracle. Thought is miracle.' I was also shocked once as a boy on Easter, of all days. The existence of a rushing creek after a heavy rain screamed at me in its beauty and its 'thereness.' Off and on I'd have lesser versions of this kind of thing, but they got rarer as I aged. Nevertheless, these experiences surely inform my leaning-toward a 'mysticism of being' that is more or less wordless as a mere pointing. The attunement is everything, and it's not in power to control that attunement. On the bright side, philosophy maintains some quiet ember under the ashes for me. This is aesthetics-as-ethics is some ways. One wants to be kind (when possible), but for me there is no explicit law to be had or recognized. I have to improvise, often regretting things that should/could have been done better, with more kindness-openness-grace.

Your posts are a model of courtesy. — Wayfarer

Thanks. Yours too.

↪Pattern-chaser
Exactly! Thank you. — hks

Your concern for my philosophical mental hygiene is touching, but I shan't be needing it again, thank you.

I like to agree with people who are smart and disagree with people who are stupid.

I like to discuss philosophy with all kinds of people. Good luck! :up:

I am putting you on my "Smart List" for now.

↪Pattern-chaser
I am putting you on my "Smart List" for now. — hks

If you have an ignore-list, I think it would suit us both better if you put my name there.