I think you are on to something, though the word 'real' is perhaps unnecessary. As I see it, one task of the philosopher is to reveal so-called necessity as a congealed and disguised contingency which hides in plain sight. 'That which is ontically nearest is ontologically farthest.' Trapped in the illusion of necessity, deviation is not yet even conceivable. Possibility languishes unborn. Along these lines, the philosopher has an intensity of withdrawal that allows the too obvious to finally become questionable. — lll

Well, I am taken aback again. If you've read Heidegger, then you have a perspective.

The intensity of withdrawal? Not many would talk like this around here. This withdrawal is a radical concept lying not in the everydayness of things, nor in the discoveries of science, but at the fringe of intelligible thought itself: metaphysics. But this that languishes unborn, this nostalgia should not be historically conceived. It is immanent in presence, in the metaphysical presence, but not in the negative sense; a positive one, for apophatically a person can discover things most extraordinary about the lived actuality of what has been called nunc stans. In other words, there is that "childhood sense of adventure" Kierkegaard talks about in The Concept of Anxiety that inspired Heidegger's What Is Metaphysics and the "nothing" which is this foundational nothing we encounter when we pull back for affairs. There is something to the nothing, but here, one has left analysis. Now the matter turns of the revelatory.

The plurality of existence which is embedded in our brain — L'éléphant

Don't you think the plurality of existence, the manifold I, the we, is embedded between the manifolds of brains and physical worlds? Aren't all creatures, from ants, crickets, and squirrels, to people, giraffes, and green whales situated between these two worlds? And are their and our bodies not just the essence of their being?

Without determined process, we can't have free will in the first place. Processes in our brain and the outside physical world develop determined, like us in between. Does that make us non-free? No. If we are that determined bodily (i.e., that body) process there is nothing that makes us s puppet with strings attached. We are tied with uncuttable strings to brain and outside world, and both are necessary for us to exist, to walk, talk, sleep, dream, sing, and even philosophize. Only when we are forced, our free will can be imparted.

The intensity of withdrawal? Not many would talk like this around here. — Constance

Agreed. Is there something sociopathic-shamanic about the philosopher? A controlled touch of madness?

I watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor. This is my dream; this is my nightmare.

but at the fringe of intelligible thought itself: metaphysics. — Constance

'Fringe' sounds right on it.

this nostalgia should not be historically conceived. — Constance

I was thinking not of nostalgia but of a withdrawal of conformity sufficient unto the day to see the Right way as merely the tribe's way. I think of dogs trained by wireless leashes.

there is that "childhood sense of adventure" Kierkegaard talks about in The Concept of Anxiety — Constance

Intriguing. Do philosophers (the 'special' kind) refuse to crow up? (Peter Pun asks Windy.)

There is something to the nothing, but here, one has left analysis. Now the matter turns of the revelatory. — Constance

Perhaps analysis computes with the metaphors provided by revelation once they've cooled and congealed?

But it can be approached phonologically in the analysis of the structure of experience. If you want to go there, it does get interesting. Let me know. — Constance

Intriguing. I am attached (at least on this forum) to that which gives itself at least partially to language. I am inclined to respect the revelatory or disclosive or inventive aspects of what is called thinking.

It seems that whatever I think of, I can position myself apart from it, in an act of reflection. This reflective self is always NOT the role being played. But cannot be observed or even conceived. — Constance

I don't think you are quite following me, though you make some good related points with which I agree. Try to imagine the so-called unity of individual consciousness or of the metaphysical subject as a prejudice or an invention that's been so successful that it's become too obvious almost to question. If there is a genuine unity on the scene, it is perhaps that of 'reason' or the system of interdependent concepts which is a community's primary property. In other words, the unity is that of the softwhere, which is (so runs my speculation) projected onto the visually singular skull. Invoking Heidegger's 'one' as conceived by Dreyfus, we end up with 'one is one around here.' Those who find less or more than one ghost in their mud are mad.

Perhaps nothing is necessary. Reality is overrated. Why is the film industry a multi-billion dollar enterprise? — Agent Smith

Oh we love love our fantasies. I'm mostly with Blake and Vico myself. We secrete the reel world chew gather, poetically. We undergo self help noses, each of us a stuff where developer. Keep your ice built for very tails or a mouse itch in a puddle. The shoe mud go on, wither or not flu ossify nose rats wheel.

I was thinking not of nostalgia but of a withdrawal of conformity sufficient unto the day to see the Right way as merely the tribe's way. I think of dogs trained by wireless leashes. — lll

Well, that does put a damper on going to the state fair, and everything else, really. What survives? The question insinuates itself into every corner of existence, into language itself, then the self itself. At this point, you're either mentally ill, or you're enlightened. If you believe there is such a thing as the latter, and I do, though it is difficult, this is forced into analysis and you end up reading things that further alienate, or, rationalize alienation, and you end up thinking people are just lost and understand nothing....and you're right!

That wireless leash sounds like Foucault's panopticon society, in which everybody is the keeper, even ourselves.

Intriguing. Do philosophers (the 'special' kind) refuse to crow up? (Peter Pun asks Windy.) — lll

Reading them, one gets the impression that they want very much to leave this world. Who could blame them? It is an awful place. Very good to me, relatively speaking, but so awful this tonnage of suffering that history is made of. One day, you're a ballerina, the next Putin has drops a bridge on you.
Suffering and happiness, these are the stuff of the only meaningful philosophical issues. Value and metavalue. All things yield to this. Put a lighted match to your finger for a few seconds. What is THAT doing in existence? Here is Kierkegaard:

One sticks one’s finger into the soil to tell by the smell in what land one is: I stick my finger in existence — it smells of nothing. Where am I? Who am I? How came I here? What is this thing called the world? What does this world mean? Who is it that has lured me into the world? Why was I not consulted, why not made acquainted with its manners and customs instead of throwing me into the ranks, as if I had been bought by a kidnapper, a dealer in souls? How did I obtain an interest in this big enterprise they call reality? Why should I have an interest in it? Is it not a voluntary concern? And if I am to be compelled to take part in it, where is the director? I should like to make a remark to him. Is there no director? Whither shall I turn with my complaint?

Perhaps analysis computes with the metaphors provided by revelation once they've cooled and congealed? — lll

That is clearly what happens, if there is anything such as revelation. Irony plays against, metaphors play with something else in language, but whether there is an inroad to existence that is NOT language is the big question. Ask Derrida. Can language ever really touch the world? If not, what is this horrible tennis elbow experience? It ain't language....but it IS there. Oh my. Are we not steeped in metaphysics in the most obvious, intuitive way? Right before our very noses?

Well, that does put a damper on going to the state fair, and everything else, really. What survives? The question insinuates itself into every corner of existence, into language itself, then the self itself. At this point, you're either mentally ill, or you're enlightened. — Constance

As I see it, nonconformity is only ever partial if it's at all intelligible. I agree with Rorty and others that metaphors are mad, essentially senseless until assimilated by a mutating dance. Is Hooligans Wink a work of madness? It takes us back to Vico's divine men, poets without distance from their ghost-gushing imaginations, living therefore a thunder-hunted world of fairy tails. The proximity of madness and enlightenment reminds me Cambell's talk of the shaman as an ambiguous figure, a sort of necessary evil for the tribe, the one who forays beyond the fence, a bastard John Snow, secretly a king (unacknowledged legislator of moon kind.)

Reading them, one gets the impression that they want very much to leave this world. — Constance

Reminds me of Nietzsche's vision of all the life-hating old men and their blasphemies against the river that ever runs over (life.) On the flip there's an imperial lust for cultural conquest and a polymorphously preverse lust for 'this meal over flush.' It may be philosopher of immanence are some of 'em erotomaniacal messengers whose shine is the quest young murk or the muted pose thorn.

One day, you're a ballerina, the next Putin has drops a bridge on you.
Suffering and happiness, these are the stuff of the only meaningful philosophical issues. — Constance

I agree, and yet insist that qualia are alogical, elusive, paradoxical. So we must talk of objects. Bridges dropped on ballerinas is beautiful, the sentence of course and not the situation.

I stick my finger in existence — it smells of nothing. Where am I? Who am I? How came I here? What is this thing called the world? What does this world mean? Who is it that has lured me into the world? Why was I not consulted, why not made acquainted with its manners and customs instead of throwing me into the ranks, as if I had been bought by a kidnapper, a dealer in souls? How did I obtain an interest in this big enterprise they call reality? Why should I have an interest in it? Is it not a voluntary concern? And if I am to be compelled to take part in it, where is the director? I should like to make a remark to him. Is there no director? Whither shall I turn with my complaint? — Constance

Beautiful quote ! Reminds me of Dostoevsky and Sartre.

Also of this:

Move him into the sun—
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.

Think how it wakes the seeds—
Woke once the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides
Full-nerved, still warm, too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
—O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth's sleep at all?

This is the knotty child who questions Everything with that most terrible of questions. Why is there a here here? Why did me mud wake up ? Who drags me from the void to make me march and pretend? There is beauty in the horror, for the lad is a sacred victim of the gods who hide in gore. The nihilist is christ on the cross as he doubts the fondness of his too far father.

Irony plays against, metaphors play with something else in language, but whether there is an inroad to existence that is NOT language is the big question. Ask Derrida. Can language ever really touch the world? If not, what is this horrible tennis elbow experience? It ain't language....but it IS there. — Constance

One of my versions of that is the smell of 'garbage juice' which the trucks leave behind in the early morning. How ineffable that spell ! Feuerbach stressed sensation as that which eludes our nets. What is this whole in my morning donut? What is this gap twixt my chew front thief ? A reference offer (our ever rinse over, a river runs over).

I don't think you're agreeing with Schopenhauer. The freedom is in thinking, according to him. Our actions then becomes caused by our thinking. So, what conclusion could you form about this? The necessity is in our action, but freedom is in our thinking. Determinism is misplaced here. The ocean example is to point to you that one could think about an action, but chooses not to act on it.

As I see it, nonconformity is only ever partial if it's at all intelligible. I agree with Rorty and others that metaphors are mad, essentially senseless until assimilated by a mutating dance. Is Hooligans Wink a work of madness? It takes us back to Vico's divine men, poets without distance from their ghost-gushing imaginations, living therefore a thunder-hunted world of fairy tails. The proximity of madness and enlightenment reminds me Cambell's talk of the shaman as an ambiguous figure, a sort of necessary evil for the tribe, the one who forays beyond the fence, a bastard John Snow, secretly a king (unacknowledged legislator of moon kind.) — lll

It does make you wonder. A Korean man nailed himself to a cross, somehow, imitating Christ. Easy enough to call him mad, but the real question to me is, what was going on in his mind to give him that kind of conviction? It must have been an extraordinary thing. Me? I wonder if the oatmeal cookies will be done in time for dessert. Forget the "truth" (Maybe truth is a woman, Nietzsche wrote) and its antiseptic
pathology. Nietzsche really liked Emerson, a Unitarian minister, for a good reason: He took the soul to such heights and revealed something of what the age of reason buried deep: a fathomless and impossible affirmation: "I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God."

All this insipid philosophical bickering over God occludes the unspeakable presence of the world, which can be powerful, profound, beautiful, like those first few minutes of Mahler's 9th. Or Barber's Summer Knoxville 1915. This is where one should live. I dare say.

The nihilist is christ on the cross as he doubts the fondness of his too far father. — lll

Christs finest moment is his cry of dereliction. Was he a nihilist for the moment only, or did it follow him to his death? Then, the withdrawal of God was the moment he became a human being. You want to be there at the foot of the cross screaming up, Oh, so now you get it. It takes a jolt.

Christs finest moment is his cry of dereliction. — Constance

Only the damned are grand, and it's when daddy glows away that baby gets to rare that groan of thorns.

Then, the withdrawal of God was the moment he became a human being. — Constance

The incarnation is completed exactly then, whiff no more got in the sky leftover.

You want to be there at the foot of the cross screaming up, Oh, so now you get it. It takes a jolt. — Constance

Yes. The moral of the sorry is gory.

Move him into the sun—
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.

Think how it wakes the seeds—
Woke once the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides
Full-nerved, still warm, too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
—O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth's sleep at all?

Oh, this is Wilfred Owen. I didn't recognize. I taught WWI British poetry once to high school students (in India, no less). I did not teach this one. He and Siegfried Sassoon. Bloody mess to read. Some of the imagery was simply too much to bear.

I wonder if the oatmeal cookies will be done in time for dessert. — Constance

I want the next misses in a puddle in a two please bikini, aloof in sheets coding, eternally farting years old (every tug has its toy.) Born in scene, upon scum, I prey with my wait paint which is wet point. (I like the idea of a prophetic protagonist explaining his peach humpediment, symbolizing philosophy's struggle to master its own treacherous medium.)

Oh, this is Wilfred Owen. I didn't recognize. — Constance

First bumped into it in an anthology as a teen. Some of his lines are as good as any I know.

I want the next misses in a puddle in a two please bikini, aloof in sheets coding, eternally farting years old (every tug has its toy.) Born in scence, upon scum, I prey with my wait paint which is wet point. — lll

That really is adorable. A wolf in sheep's clothing. Just got that one.

Forget the "truth" (Maybe truth is a woman, Nietzsche wrote) and its antiseptic pathology. Nietzsche really liked Emerson, a Unitarian minister, for a good reason: He took the soul to such heights and revealed something of what the age of reason buried deep: a fathomless and impossible affirmation — Constance

Nietzsche is dear to me, for exactly what you sketch above.

The recluse does not believe that a philosopher—supposing that a philosopher has always in the first place been a recluse—ever expressed his actual and ultimate opinions in books: are not books written precisely to hide what is in us?—indeed, he will doubt whether a philosopher CAN have "ultimate and actual" opinions at all; whether behind every cave in him there is not, and must necessarily be, a still deeper cave: an ampler, stranger, richer world beyond the surface, an abyss behind every bottom, beneath every "foundation." Every philosophy is a foreground philosophy—this is a recluse's verdict... — Nietzsche

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4363/4363-h/4363-h.htm

I wonder if you've seen this more obscure passage:

The true content of romantic art is absolute inwardness, and its corresponding form is spiritual subjectivity with its grasp of its independence and freedom. This inherently infinite and absolutely universal content is the absolute negation of everything particular, the simple unity with itself which has dissipated all external relations, all processes of nature and their periodicity of birth, passing away, and rebirth, all the restrictedness in spiritual existence, and dissolved all particular gods into a pure and infinite self-identity. In this Pantheon all the gods are dethroned, the flame of subjectivity has destroyed them, and instead of plastic polytheism art knows now only one God, one spirit, one absolute independence which, as the absolute knowing and willing of itself, remains in free unity with itself and no longer falls apart into those particular characters and functions whose one and only cohesion was due to the compulsion of a dark necessity.
...
God in his truth is therefore no bare ideal generated by imagination; on the contrary, he puts himself into the very heart of the finitude and external contingency of existence, and yet knows himself there as a divine subject who remains infinite in himself and makes this infinity explicit to himself. — Hegel

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ae/part2-section3.htm#s1

That really is adorable. A wolf in sheep's clothing. Just got that one. — Constance

Ah, thank you for tolerating my playfulness and wetting for the point to try. I'm studying Chimes Joys lately.

I taught WWI British poetry once to high school students (in India, no less). — Constance

Sounds like an adventure.

That really is adorable. A wolf in sheep's clothing. Just got that one. — Constance

I'm also aloft in cheeps clothing.

We are tied with uncuttable strings to brain and outside world, and both are necessary for us to exist, to walk, talk, sleep, dream, sing, and even philosophize. — EugeneW

Well put. Even to think is to splash in chirps and barks the 'meaning' of which we did not assign but only adapted to you as we might learn to use a knife and spoon. The noise 'mommy' and the light switch, tools for a body to touch in its dance with the world.

All this insipid philosophical bickering over God occludes the unspeakable presence of the world, which can be powerful, profound, beautiful, like those first few minutes of Mahler's 9th. Or Barber's Summer Knoxville 1915. This is where one should live. I dare say. — Constance

I don't though those musical references well (I do love music), but I agree that the bickering occludes raging beauty and terror. I think of Job's visit by the whirlwind.

Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind and said:
“Who is this who obscures My counsel by words without knowledge?Now brace yourself like a man; I will question you, and you shall inform Me. Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell Me, if you have understanding. Who fixed its measurements? Surely you know! Or who stretched a measuring line across it? On what were its foundations set, or who laid its cornerstone, while the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?"
...

Do you give strength to the horse or adorn his neck with a mane? Do you make him leap like a locust, striking terror with his proud snorting? He paws in the valley and rejoices in his strength; he charges into battle. He laughs at fear, frightened of nothing; he does not turn back from the sword. A quiver rattles at his side, along with a flashing spear and lance. Trembling with excitement, he devours the distance; he cannot stand still when the ram’s horn sounds. At the blast of the horn, he snorts with fervor. He catches the scent of battle from afar—the shouts of captains and the cry of war.

Does the hawk take flight by your understanding and spread his wings toward the south? Does the eagle soar at your command and make his nest on high? He dwells on a cliff and lodges there; his stronghold is on a rocky crag. From there he spies out food; his eyes see it from afar. His young ones feast on blood; and where the slain are, there he is.
...
Would you really annul My justice? Would you condemn Me to justify yourself? Do you have an arm like God’s? Can you thunder with a voice like His?Then adorn yourself with majesty and splendor, and clothe yourself with honor and glory. Unleash the fury of your wrath; look on every proud man and bring him low. Look on every proud man and humble him; trample the wicked where they stand. Bury them together in the dust; imprison them in the grave. Then I will confess to you that your own right hand can save you..."

https://biblehub.com/bsb/job/39.htm

As others have noted this is an amoral or transmoral God drunk on the beauty and madness and terror of his creation. This is a world behind the film of all the boring self-righteous posturing and lecturing inflicted upon Job by those to desperate for the installation therein of cosmic justice to be obliterated by its beauty. We like to cover it over with a slab of the fog of the blob of our blab. Yet this glorious vision too is the flap of a glob of a grab of our gab, another both dump flu of as it.

I don't think you're agreeing with Schopenhauer. The freedom is in thinking, according to him. Our actions then becomes caused by our thinking. So, what conclusion could you form about this? The necessity is in our action, but freedom is in our thinking. Determinism is misplaced here. The ocean example is to point to you that one could think about an action, but chooses not to act on it. — L'éléphant

But that choice we make is still bound to what the understanding can conceive, and this makes something like "independence of the law of causality" just an apodictic impossibility. I don't think naturalists will be moved one bit by this; they will simply say, transcendental will??? You must be mad. They will pull out Occam's razor, or insist the facts do not support such an idea, and dismiss it.

I am for demonstrating freedom, first. Where does it show up in the world that we can even talk about it? It shows up in judgment, the kind of judgment that responds to a break in the well being of affairs, like the car not starting, or the hammer's head flying off. Prior to this kind of break, freedom can in no way be seen. My fingers may be busy typing these words, but it is not a "free" act that is doing it. In fact, it would be a disaster to in interpose my "freedom," that is, my conscious awareness, between the fingers and action. I wouldn't be able to type second guessing every movement. Most of life is lived like this, an unconscious process. Foucault asked, are we not being ventriloquized by history? I always thought tis fascinating: how can one see where automatic systems end, and "I" begins? For my "will" is a question begging concept: will is always will to do something, and this is impossible without something that is not will, namely, a value, a motivation that creates to desire that makes one want, need. A will without this is nonsense. A will to.....will? No motivation, no will.

Kant is maddening on this. Talking about a "good will" that responds dutifully to rationally conceived obligations that may NOT have desire behind them. This disembodied rational will is a pure fiction, just like the categories (which make sense analytically, yes. But to treat them as an actuality??)

So for me, at any rate, this break in our affairs shows where freedom is to be found. It gets, frankly, a bit weird from here, and I'll make is brief: Take this simple break, the hammer head flying off, and there you are in the middle of a suddenly dissociated action. But, you are no longer in the "spell," the pragmatic spell, I would argue, of the carrying forth. You are no longer "carried". Most, of course, move directly to an examination of remedies. But take the idea of freedom to its philosophical conception, and it is not a hammered, it is the question about the world as such. We, at this most basic level, are in, and ARE indeterminacy. No matter where the critical gaze goes, it will always meet with indeterminacy; in time, space, identity, ontology, aesthetics, and on and on, indeterminacy. Our freedom lies here, in the radical withdrawal from, not a hammer's use or a car's ignition, but ALL THINGS.

(Obviously, all I say here is derivative, with my own take on things applied. We all stand on the shoulders of others.)

This can be argued about, if you have the desire to do so.

It's in the thinking that we achieve freedom. — L'éléphant

:fire:

:ok: How true. It just dawned on me that you're unequivocally right, no strings attached. We can actually think anything, absolutely anything at all. Even consider the situation when we don't possess free will - we can mull over all the options in our head, even conduct simulations as best as we can with all options on the table. Making a choice is a different matter (we maybe constrained), thinking about all possible choices is a different story (we're free as a bird).

Yes, deliberating the future is freedom in thinking as you're supposing things that haven't happened yet. No one can accuse you of making a decision that's already determined. Of course, they're gonna try to say, all future things are already determined. Then ask them, then predict something bad that's gonna happen in the future and let's avoid it. Or, try to predict some nuclear war in the far future, and let's change the course of our action. The future is not determined. We have the freedom to think how to shape the future.

Non-action, as Schopenhauer indicated, is also a decision.

I can think whatever the hell I want. That's freedom, oui?

Suppose determinism is true. Even in this case, I can ponder upon all options available and even simulate (in my mind) making any choice whatsoever; you know, if I do this, then that, then that, and so on. Determinism will mean the actual choice you make is not yours, that's all. However, being able to contemplate all pathways when you reach a choice node is freedom (of will) in thinking (at least).