Do you follow me?

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.

Good!

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.)

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

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

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

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

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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.

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. — macrosoft

Allow me to ease the concerns...

I'm not invoking Kant.

Mt. Everest...

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

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?

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

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

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.

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.

Not everything has something essential that makes it what it is aside from our calling it whatever we call it.

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. — macrosoft

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

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.

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. — macrosoft

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

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.

...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. — macrosoft

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

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).

Shared...

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.

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

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.

I've issues with phenomenological jargon.

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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.

Been great. See ya next time!

Cheers!!!

You too. Have a great night,

Hmmm... after a re-read, it seems I missed a bit of opportunity. You'll have that when hyper focusing upon making an argument, point, or setting out a position...

:wink:

There's much more to be discussed.