t is all of what we might say, and yet none of these: certainly logic is not about nothing, nor is affectivity; but concepts like these that quantify and divide experience, because they are categories, do not represent the original uncategorized primordial whole. — Astrophel

I agree that what is said is not an adequate reflection of what is experienced.

The question then is, what does affectivity "say" in the setting of being restored to its place? — Astrophel

Affectivity alone does not say anything, it is just feeling.

I am taking the notion of intellectual intuition to task. Intellectualism gives undo privilege to cognition, and the term cognition, like all terms, is an artificial structure imposed on the world to talk about it, manage it, have discourse on it, and so on. — Astrophel

I agree with you that the way cognition is understood is simplistic, but I don't think we social primates are doing so badly at increasing our understanding of the subject. It's a really complicated subject.

But the original whole out of which this categorical thinking issues remains what it is. It is all of what we might say, and yet none of these: certainly logic is not about nothing, nor is affectivity; but concepts like these that quantify and divide experience, because they are categories, do not represent the original uncategorized primordial whole.
The idea here is to put at bay the knowledge claims that spontaneously spring into play when we experience the world. Such a suspension delivers the world from the imposition of abstraction that the primacy of the intellect has brought to philosophy. And affectivity is no longer pushed into irrelevance.

The question then is, what does affectivity "say" in the setting of being restored to its place? — Astrophel

It seems to me that you have a rather small box that you want to fit your understanding of human cognition into. What is the basis of your theory of mind?

The question then is, what does affectivity "say" in the setting of being restored to its place?
— Astrophel

Affectivity alone does not say anything, it is just feeling — Janus

Reminds me of Heidegger's encapsulation of the long-standing Western attitude toward affect.

“Psychology, after all, has always distinguished between thinking, willing, and feeling. It is not by chance that it will always name feeling in the third, subordinate position. Feelings are the third class of lived experience. For naturally man is in the first place the rational living being.”

In opposition to this view, enactivists insist that cognitive and affective processes are closely interdependent, with affect, emotion and sensation functioning in multiple ways and at multiple levels to situate or attune the context of our conceptual dealings with the world , and that affective tonality is never absent from cognition. As Matthew Ratcliffe puts it, “moods are no longer a subjective window-dressing on privileged theoretical perspectives but a background that constitutes the sense of all intentionalities, whether theoretical or practical.”

Embodied theorists reverse the traditional scheme of prioritization of thought over feelings, by making affective inputs the condition of possibility of relevance and meaning in thought. It is through the feeling body that things show up as salient; an alteration in how the body feels is at the same time a shift in how the world appears and in how one relates to it.

:up:

Right, except that I'm not prioritising thought over feeling. If anything I go the other way. Thought without affect is of no significance.

On the other hand affect without thought is not without significance but is of no discursive significance.

Sounds to me like a revelation is what you are looking for, but why think there is any relationship between intuitions and revelation? — wonderer1

Revelation: something revealed. Intuition: something intuited, and something intuited reveals that which is intuited, doesn't it? Nothing ambiguous here. And the question remains: what is it, exactly, that is intuited. My position is that we live in a world which has a secret, a metaphysical secret that is brought into existence by language: language divides the world and hypostatizes these divisions making the world seem categorically diverse and analytically complex. But its not.

There is "behind" our routine knowledge claims a foundation of intuited reality that can only be acknowledged if we suspend the the abstract processes of thought-in-the-world. The revelation follows a restoration of an original intuition lost in the drive to explain, solve problems, and so on.

I am saying quite the opposite: there is an ontology that stands behind, with, and in, all knowledge claims, rendering them epistemically non arbitrary. This is the point. — Astrophel

If you can elaborate this a little more I would like to hear it. Note: plain language would help if possible.

… analysis places the intuition apart from the understanding, the former being affective, the latter cognitive, and the understanding is distinctively cognitive. Non propositional knowledge is not recognized. — Astrophel

Agreed, in principle. What does any of that have to do with existential absolutes or foundational existences? I mean, you brought them up….I guess….in an attempt to lay the groundwork for something apparently about the world, but from what you’ve called our contemplative midst. I can’t seem to find a connection you’ve made between them, as yet anyway.

One is simply directed to purify one's gaze, deliver observation from the presumptive thinking that generally steps in and makes claims and argues…. — Astrophel

To purify one’s gaze makes none but metaphorical sense, but nevertheless observation is already delivered…..separated…..from presumptive thinking, which you’ve already granted, insofar as affective intuition is placed apart from cognitive understanding.

But I argue that even though we face the world in a determinate historical way (educated and enculturated), the event of acknowledging something retains its original status as an intuition. — Astrophel

Again, agreed in principle, overlooking the repetitive semantic disassociation (we in general face the world, but each subject alone, retains some original status). Still, no exposition of a relation between an existential absolutes and foundational intuitions. And yet the problem seems to be the loss of foundational intuitions and the subsequent recovery of them, or at least their status as such. But how can that be the case, in a systemic whole? Can’t lose a part then get it back and still have the system maintain itself.

They say that once an intuition is observed it is already embedded in context, and the "purity" (or innocence) of the observation is entirely undone. — Astrophel

I’m guessing that because intuitions are representations of observations, the rationale is that the innocence of being observed is lost to manifestation as phenomenon. While that does no harm, it also has no benefit. Seems like naught but a minor rendition of “non-overlapping magisteria”, in that observation is this, intuition is that and while one necessarily presupposes the other, neither is contained in the other. In other words, intuitions are never that which is observed, which in turn leaves observation to be just what it is, no part of it in the least undone.
————-

I think you’re trying to elaborate on the distinction between private philosophy (thought) and public philosophizing (thought-in-the-world), re:

It is called 'I am' in the context of language; it is complex in that when you look for the 'I am" you find a multiplicity, not a singularity. One finds thinking, feeling and the rest; but a single "I" does not show up. — Astrophel

So it was called “I am” in the context of “I think”, as it should be. I am that which thinks, is a singularity. Even though “I” never shows up in thought, it is nonetheless the case that all thought is the manifestation of a singular thinker, for which “I” is merely the representation. All of THAT, in the context of language.

On the other hand affect without thought is not without significance, but is of no discursive significance. — Janus

If by discourse you mean language, isnt verbal discourse merely a formalized product of a more fundamental discursive process of inter-affection? And is there ever affect without thought? What is thinking if not construing on the basis of similarities and differences, and what is construing if not a way of being affected by events? Isnt the distinction between thought and feeling arbitrary and unjustified? When dispositions to act and acts themselves, being and becoming, feeling and intention, state and function, body and mind are treated as separately inhering states, then their relations are rendered secondary and arbitrary, requiring extrinsic causations to piece them together.

Embodied theorists reverse the traditional scheme of prioritization of thought over feelings, by making affective inputs the condition of possibility of relevance and meaning in thought. It is through the feeling body that things show up as salient; an alteration in how the body feels is at the same time a shift in how the world appears and in how one relates to it. — Joshs

Yes, feelings are obviously an important subject. Then there is the distinction between needs or desires and feelings? Is hunger a feeling? If I desire a new jacket is that a need? When I have acquired the desired jacket and I am satisfied with it is that a feeling? Interesting and complicated subject. We would need a phenomenology of emotions and all related phenomena.

Sounds to me like a revelation is what you are looking for, but why think there is any relationship between intuitions and revelation? — wonderer1

Not so much looking for, as if set out to find one. But I do think the encounter with the world that is discovered is revelatory. It is a revelation to liberate one existence from the categorical illusions created by historical analyses. It is a revelation about what one intuits when intuition discovers the world that has been pushed out of sight by language and culture.

:up:

If you can elaborate this a little more I would like to hear it. Note: plain language would help if possible. — I like sushi

Plain language in an exotic philosophical setting. Exotic because this kind of thing is almost anathema in Anglo American philosophy, as I have read.

What is it to know? If there is no way to account for this, then we are lost. I mean, if language is only self referential, and one cannot grasp even in the imagination what, at the most basis level, of knowledge claims could even possibly be, then knowledge isexistentially without meaning. What do I mean by existentially? Reference is to existence, and existence refers to the palpable "sense" of being here, and this refers to not simply raw physical feels and impositions, but, thoughts, and affectivity (a broadly conceived affectivity that comprises our ethics and aesthetics). Do thoughts exist? Of course. Existence is not to be reduced to "metaphysical physics". Does affectivity exist? A foolish question, really: nothing could be more palpable.

I think language gets lost in language, and it is the familiarity of language that removes for our sight an original existence, not original in an historical sense, as if once long ago, but original as in something primordial and "under the skin" of what we call experience.
Easy to access, in a way, because while language creates an analytic divided world, it also puts it back to gether again; in other words, language is also redemptive when the direction of inquiry goes to basic questions: those words you're thinking now, from whence to they come? I am thinking of Beckett's book Molloy. the idea is how to get around the extraordinary claim that it is language that speaks! Not "me". Molloy/Molone is dying, but it is not the death of the body, but of language, and words that linger to the end, grasping for existence, knowing soon words will not sustain the monologue that is the self.

What does one make of such a thing? You see, language creates the drama of being alive; it IS this drama. It is argued here, by me, that this, well, staged event of being a person is a constructed imposition on existence, because Molloy's existence is clearly NOT the vacuity of language, of words qua words.

Agreed, in principle. What does any of that have to do with existential absolutes or foundational existences? I mean, you brought them up….I guess….in an attempt to lay the groundwork for something apparently about the world, but from what you’ve called our contemplative midst. I can’t seem to find a connection you’ve made between them, as yet anyway. — Mww

One has to ask what a foundational existence could even mean, first. Simple description comes first. description of the world at the basic level. Absolutes are not to be found in discursive argument. Rather, argument leads to something radically other.

And also keeping in mind that a word like 'absolute' has already corrupted the inquiry. I mention this only to make clear that references to something existential, in my thinking, takes one the the threshold where what can be spoken yields to what cannot.

As to "about the world": what is the world? I mean, when you use this term, what do you mean? What I mean by it is the Totality of our existence. By existence I mean all that is there, and interpretatively in play.

To purify one’s gaze makes none but metaphorical sense, but nevertheless observation is already delivered…..separated…..from presumptive thinking, which you’ve already granted, insofar as affective intuition is placed apart from cognitive understanding. — Mww

It is a problem to speak of it. One has to be careful, for language summons its own, so to speak.

Not simply metaphorical. It is a method of removing historically augmented thought from one's apperceptive beholding of the world. One is spontaneously inclined to deploy analytic thinking to solve a problem, it has become nearly impossible to engage is what could be called "gelassenheit", a term familiar to the Amish and others, but certainly it is not them I have in mind. Gelassenheit is a yielding to discover, such that the conceptual domination over experience is reduced to a kind of humility.

This is not religious talk. A natural scientist does this, clearly, and of necessity, as systems of thought are first responsible to listening, watching, taking in the world. Here, it is just a philosophical "taking in" which is not something the scientist can handle well, for the "evidence" to be observed lies not in the routine empiricism, but in the intuited underpinning of this. Which is ignored, generally.

Again, agreed in principle, overlooking the repetitive semantic disassociation (we in general face the world, but each subject alone, retains some original status). Still, no exposition of a relation between an existential absolutes and foundational intuitions. And yet the problem seems to be the loss of foundational intuitions and the subsequent recovery of them, or at least their status as such. But how can that be the case, in a systemic whole? Can’t lose a part then get it back and still have the system maintain itself. — Mww

That is, unless the foundational intuition in question is there not as a part at all. If I take your meaning, you are asking how some primoradial intuition can be conceived by a agency of divided thought? To think at all is divisive, analytic, manifold and the like. But it gets worse: how can intuition be wrested from the grip of history, personal and cultural, from memory as it seizes upon the present making it its own? Memory and anticipation own time and therefore, existence?

If this is the premise, then it seems hopeless, and 'nonpropositional knowledge" is impossible. But I don't think language, while manufacturing abstractions ("the presidency" say, is an abstraction; though the utterance, the thought, is an actuality) freely in a culture, constricts meaning's possibilities. I can, in other words, behold what is not language, yet is "in" a language that conceives what is beheld. Thinking only "corrupts" intuition when it is categorically insistent.

Wake up in the morning, and interpretation spontaneously seizes the day, so to speak. Not what Whitman had in mind, this "going along" into the regular affairs that carve out one's existence. What is being suggested here is that standing apart from this can restore something not simply at peace, but radically outside the Totality of what thought, as a cultural institution, can say.

I’m guessing that because intuitions are representations of observations, the rationale is that the innocence of being observed is lost to manifestation as phenomenon. While that does no harm, it also has no benefit. Seems like naught but a minor rendition of “non-overlapping magisteria”, in that observation is this, intuition is that and while one necessarily presupposes the other, neither is contained in the other. In other words, intuitions are never that which is observed, which in turn leaves observation to be just what it is, no part of it in the least undone. — Mww

Intuition as representations is entirely on the other side of the idea presented here. One has to drop this primacy of rationality as the way to understand the world. To think like this encourages the problem. Presupposition is part of a rational game of discursivity. Intuition is far and away NOT about this.

I think you’re trying to elaborate on the distinction between private philosophy (thought) and public philosophizing (thought-in-the-world), re:

It is called 'I am' in the context of language; it is complex in that when you look for the 'I am" you find a multiplicity, not a singularity. One finds thinking, feeling and the rest; but a single "I" does not show up.
— Astrophel

So it was called “I am” in the context of “I think”, as it should be. I am that which thinks, is a singularity. Even though “I” never shows up in thought, it is nonetheless the case that all thought is the manifestation of a singular thinker, for which “I” is merely the representation. All of THAT, in the context of language. — Mww

"I am" is not a singularity. there are no such things in language. To think at all is to be in the deployment of universals. this is what we seek to step beyond, yet of necessity, stay within: to engage a singularity is impossible. To engage an intuition that imparts novel meaning, and then to look to language and find that universality of reference is really a temporal imposition that tries to "claim" the intuition and assimilate it into a common idea, puts language in a dubious position. For one then has to reconcile language with what is NOT in the Totality of what is commonly held, and indeed, what is not language at all.
This is the issue here. It is that taking truth to be a matter of the understanding, and then relegating the understanding to rationality along with the combined reductive tendency of a culture, is the very essence of philosophical error. Originally, if you will, we are "of a piece" in affectivity, conceived broadly, and reason---that are, keeping in mind, only affectivity and reason because they are so named in an analytic process. But it is an impossible whole to conceive within the discursivity of a Totality, unless that Totality is committed to a form of gelassenheit (see above).

One has to ask what a foundational existence could even mean — Astrophel

I asked, because you brought them up. I’m guessing you know what a can of worms they are, which makes me wonder….why bring them up, then do nothing with them.

And also keeping in mind that a word like 'absolute' has already corrupted the inquiry. — Astrophel

Yep. Goes without saying, so why did you bring that up along with foundational existence? Point being, you’ve said some interesting stuff, but contaminated the interest with that which doesn’t belong with, and cannot contribute to, a mutually profitable dialectic. I keep looking for a connection that doesn’t seem to be there.
————-

”I am" is not a singularity. there are no such things in language. — Astrophel

Of course there is. It’s right there. From both of us. And people in general. Perhaps the only place it is. And it has to be a singularity, meaning there is only one “I” that is. Or maybe you meant there is a plurality of “I”’s, which is fine but each is still singular in itself, insofar as no “I” can replicate any other such that a common identity is given from it.

to engage a singularity is impossible. — Astrophel

Engage with, true enough. But that does not deny that a singularity engages. How else to partake in the world?

If by discourse you mean language, isnt verbal discourse merely a formalized product of a more fundamental discursive process of inter-affection? And is there ever affect without thought? What is thinking if not construing on the basis of similarities and differences, and what is construing if not a way of being affected by events? Isnt the distinction between thought and feeling arbitrary and unjustified? When dispositions to act and acts themselves, being and becoming, feeling and intention, state and function, body and mind are treated as separately inhering states, then their relations are rendered secondary and arbitrary, requiring extrinsic causations to piece them together. — Joshs

Verbal discourse is its own unique form of discourse. There can be kinds of discourse in body language, in visual language or musical language. But it is verbal discourse I referred to, which is explicitly propositional, or at least that is the kind of verbal discourse I had in mind; you know... assertions and arguments to back up those assertions? Objects or entities and their attributes? Dualistic thinking in general?

Of course, thinking is reliant on pattern recognition and recognition of similarity and difference and nothing I've said contradicts that as far as I can tell. In the context of the whole organism there is of course no real separation between thought and feeling, but we are able, discursively, to make the distinction.

Construing can be understood to be a way of being affected by events or a way of dispassionately reflecting on events. Separations are dualistically propositional not real or fundamental —ways of understanding, not of being.

In short, I'm not clear on what you are objecting to, or exactly what point you want to make.

It is a revelation about what one intuits when intuition discovers the world that has been pushed out of sight by language and culture. — Astrophel

I agree with this, but this revelation is commonplace; it is with us every instant of everyday experience, in that which exceeds our discursive understandings of what is happening. We just have to learn to notice...

I asked, because you brought them up. I’m guessing you know what a can of worms they are, which makes me wonder….why bring them up, then do nothing with them. — Mww

You mean I should cut to the chase? I do find it a little puzzling that comments I made were in no way suggestive of "a mutually profitable dialectic." After all, the notion of an absolute of any kind should raise philosophical eyebrows. You must have views on such a thing, and my thoughts were just the occasion to bring them out, keeping in mind that one of the foundational ideas of analytic thinking is a radical rejection of metaphysics and to even mention an absolute puts the matter squarely in metaphysics.

The chase: ask. what is philosophy? It is inherently affective, and this is a very important point. To be philosophical is to address the world at the level of the most basic questions, and at this level the question turns to foundations, and foundationally, it is discovered that reason and its categories AS SUCH is an abstraction, merely. Not that priniples of logic are to be second guessed, but that what principles of logic really are, are affective events that are affective/logical/pragmatic in some inconceivable original. The "generative source" of the language that produces understanding is, as I write and think occurrently, is transcendental and not to be conceived itself as categorical, that is, as a product of what reason does.

Philosophy as an endless play of words finds itself in a kind of Derridaian loop of references that are contextualized and this contextualization has no end. Heidegger put it so well in his Origin of the Work of Art:
Thus we are compelled to follow the circle. This is neither a makeshift nor a defect.
To enter upon this path is the strength of thought, to continue on it is the feast of
thought, assuming that thinking is a craft. Not only is the main step from work to art a
circle like the step from art to work, but every separate step that we attempt circles in
this circle.

He thrives on the endless dialectic; so Hegelian. And he is right, I am sure. Philosophy is an "asymptotic" process, never to cross the final line to what it seeks. This is because philosophy conceived as "feast of thought" (and I put aside Heidegger's allusions to some determinate poetic grounding. I don't understand it all that well) and while it certainly is this, it begs the question, what is thought? It is an openness, and so forth, but thought is never simply thought; it is inherently aesthetic (see Dewey on this, though I don't think Dewey would for a moment agree with things I think are true), and what is this? Wittgenstein says we are out of our depths in a question like this. But here is the rub: Truth isn't, nor has it ever been, just a propositional affair (see Rorty, and, I guess, most analytic philosophers). To see a truth IS an aesthetic experience.

There is more to this, but I wonder if a mutually profitable dialectic has been encouraged thus far.

I agree with this, but this revelation is commonplace; it is with us every instant of everyday experience, in that which exceeds our discursive understandings of what is happening. We just have to learn to notice... — Janus

It is not simply a matter of understanding that there is an aesthetic dimension to thinking, and experiencing. It is a question of HOW one therefore produces Truth, with a capital 'T'. I could say that a performance of Ravel's le tombeau de couperin possesses "truth" but in our categorical tendencies, we take this to be a kind of metaphor.
Truth cannot be conceived apart from the world (logical truths are vacuous, and really, not apart from anything). To see a llama in the road and construct a proposition about this is already committed to abstraction, that of the proposition, the assertion, the existential quantifier, a factual state of affairs, and so on; that is, UNLESS one considers the whole experience of which the proposition is only a part, conceived in a social context.

This may still sound rather mundane, but I take the matter to philosophy, where true propositions meet metaphysics: What is it to conceive of the llama encounter at the basic level of inquiry? Keeping in mind that the understanding is no longer bound to an abstract proposition. The hard part of seeing this is assigning truth value to affectivity. Analysis gives us the habit of dividing such things: there is not truth in aesthetics, and therefore foundation thinking is going to be inherently "dryly" propositional. Metaphysics is going to be seen as a violation of clarity, because clarity is defined apart from its existential counterpart, and not as a "clarity" of affectivity.

It is hard to think like this, to imagine the principles of reason as "aesthetic principles," that modus ponens is REALLY is an event! This is Dewey. But Dewey never made the radical move: The idea of metaphysics is an aesthetic encounter, a reaching to "affirm" a desideratum that exceeds the desire.

Principled thinking is not called into question. It is rerouted to self examination that asks what does "principled" even mean? It is desire, mood, yearning, "toward"; just as reason moves forward toward consummation, it moves forward toward affective consummation, and this is the aesthetic apprehension of metaphysics. Not a line drawn in the sand of Wittgenstein (who I admire very much) and positivists. Affectivity has no such line.

I do find it a little puzzling that comments I made were in no way suggestive of "a mutually profitable dialectic." — Astrophel

Yeah, well, they weren’t. When I returned comment, it became so. The mutually beneficial part kinda fell by the wayside because of those damnable concepts inspiring little to no agreement. But forget them, I say.

There is more to this, but I wonder if a mutually profitable dialectic has been encouraged thus far. — Astrophel

I find myself agreeing with most of your writings, so the point of a dialectic is established already.

Principled thinking is not called into question. It is rerouted to self examination that asks what does "principled" even mean? It is desire, mood, yearning, "toward"; just as reason moves forward toward consummation, it moves forward toward affective consummation, and this is the aesthetic apprehension of metaphysics — Astrophel

Aren’t the affective and reason joined precisely where affective purpose, relevance and desire meet rational validation, recognition and intelligibility? This is the basis of enactivist models of sense-making, wherein the anticipatory goal-directed pragmatic functioning of an organism defines its rationality on the basis of consistency of events with its aims and desires. Reason as relevance.

The hard part of seeing this is assigning truth value to affectivity. — Astrophel

We can assign, in the sense of feel, "truth value" in the affective. It has the sense of actuality, of truth in the sense of alethia or revealing (or "unconcealing"). The act-ual is revealed by acting, by affecting.

But this notion of truth is quite different than the idea of propositional truth, which applies only to statements or assertions.

It is on account of this "revealing" of actuality which is everyday experience (when we notice it) that we can say that everyday experience is (or can be) a revelation. But this has nothing to do with discursive knowledge or explanation, because as soon as the attempt is made to describe this experience in our necessarily dualistic language the original non-duality of the actual is more or less obscured. I say "more or less" because I think the sense of non-duality, of the numinous, although not capable of description, can be evoked by metaphor, by poetic language (and of course by the other arts).

Truth isn't, nor has it ever been, just a propositional affair (see Rorty, and, I guess, most analytic philosophers). To see a truth IS an aesthetic experience. — Astrophel

Following Peirce, I would argue any notion of truth is semiotic. And science now tells us that humans engage in semiosis at four levels of encoding or sign relations.

We engage with the world via genes, neurons, words and numbers. Or more broadly, we are neurobiological creatures first, but have become also sociocultural creatures as well.

And so I say you are confusing the levels at which we “exist in the flow of nature”. Neurobiology sets us up as affective selves. We respond to the world as we find it in “emotional” ways. We read our surroundings in ways that deal with our basic survival. Our responses are the physiological states and behavioural habits appropriate to that level of world modelling.

Then philosophy comes in at a very different level. It is based on the abstracted notion of universalised reason and the specific of measurement. It is based on the third person absolute detachment that we imagine as the God’s eye objective point of view that it dialectically opposed to our embodied, affective, subjective, first person point of view.

So in reality, as living breathing human beings also carving out space in social communities, we of course feel as well as reason. We see as well as measure. It can seem impossible to split off the neurobiological aspects of our semiotic organisation from our socialcultural ones.

Yet the sensible definition of philosophy is just that. It is the attempt to reach the limit of detachment from the point of view of a creature rooted in embodied subjectivity.

Reasoning still depends on affect as we well know. It feels quite different to be certain vs uncertain. We get a feeling when something clicks and seems right - the aha! response.

But in the interests of fostering philosophical detachment, that is why we have come to lean on the pragmatism of the scientific method. We take claims of feeling convinced out of the equation as much as possible. We invent statistical methods to quantify our proper position on spectrums of certainty-uncertainty.

We aim to feel no more strongly about some conviction than that of the response of the click of pattern recognition. We have been presented with some complicated puzzle. There is then some satisfaction in making the last piece fit to complete the whole picture.

So sure, truth isn’t just propositional. AP types got that wrong. Truth comes in its grades of semiosis. The body has to react in ways that are “affective” to be effective in its world.

But then truth as a game being played at the highest level of detached abstraction is understood as “other” to this embodied affectiveness. It is Peirce’s community of reason that aims for objectivity via the cycle of abduction, deduction and inductive confirmation. Make a guess at a general causal relation, deduce the particular logical consequences of that being true, then test to see how those expectations turn out in terms of numbers on dials.

Flickers on needles rather than flickers of the heart are the currency of rational inquiry.

Aren’t the affective and reason joined precisely where affective purpose, relevance and desire meet rational validation, recognition and intelligibility? This is the basis of enactivist models of sense-making, wherein the anticipatory goal-directed pragmatic functioning of an organism defines its rationality on the basis of consistency of events with its aims and desires. Reason as relevance. — Joshs

Put it this way: Philosophers are certainly not in the business of discovering affective "truths".

There is more to this, but I wonder if a mutually profitable dialectic has been encouraged thus far. — Astrophel

On second look, perhaps it has.

philosophy conceived as "feast of thought" (….) and while it certainly is this, it begs the question, what is thought? — Astrophel

What if it could be said what thought is by what it does? If only this can be done by thinking, then the doing of this is thinking. If I think of, or cognize, a dog as fur, teeth, a tail, a nose, in a certain arrangement, and if fur, teeth, tails and noses represent conceptions I’ve thought, than I should be authorized to say….thought is cognition by means of synthesis of conceptions to each other. And its negation works just as well, insofar as if I cannot connect a set of conceptions to each other, then I have no authority to say I’ve thought anything at all.
————

but thought is never simply thought; it is inherently aesthetic (see Dewey on this — Astrophel

What does he mean by aesthetic? Something like a feeling? If so, I call that a subjective condition, but deny thought as a subjective condition while maintaining that feeling is. Thought, then, would revert to a condition of the faculty from which it arises, which is understanding.
————

Truth isn't, nor has it ever been, just a propositional affair — Astrophel

Why not? What would prevent it from being just a propositional affair? What is truth such that it cannot be merely propositional? Propositional implies a relation, so what if everything the human intellect does, is relational? It follows necessarily then, that truth must be a propositional affair.

Having suggested that philosophy, as you say, is an affective, makes explicit a relation between it and that which is affected. So….there ya go: truth, insofar as it is a philosophically determinable judgement in accordance with the laws of logical thought, is indeed a propositional affair. With the obvious caveat that we’re not talking about what is true, but only what being true, is.

Following Peirce, I would argue any notion of truth is semiotic. And science now tells us that humans engage in semiosis at four levels of encoding or sign relations.

We engage with the world via genes, neurons, words and numbers. Or more broadly, we are neurobiological creatures first, but have become also sociocultural creatures as well.

And so I say you are confusing the levels at which we “exist in the flow of nature”. Neurobiology sets us up as affective selves. We respond to the world as we find it in “emotional” ways. We read our surroundings in ways that deal with our basic survival. Our responses are the physiological states and behavioural habits appropriate to that level of world modelling.

Then philosophy comes in at a very different level. It is based on the abstracted notion of universalised reason and the specific of measurement. It is based on the third person absolute detachment that we imagine as the God’s eye objective point of view that it dialectically opposed to our embodied, affective, subjective, first person point of view. — apokrisis

Well, since you brought up evolution, consider that at the current evolutionary stage, we are faced with a world constructed out of pragmatic responses to its conditions, and these are generally talked about in terms of survival and reproduction, or perhaps genotypical codes translating into phenotypical traits that have the requisite utility. Consider further that the very observational matrix we exist in is an evolutionary construct. My position is that this construct is that the very terms of meaning making are not "about " the world, but are "made" and the search for this aboutness is philosophy's aim. So: if all we witness is structured, even in the very generative basis of experience, then all eyes turn to this structure for basic analysis. Evolution itself is called into question, for it is an empirical theory about a "world" that lies outside the structural features experience, and this itself raises serious doubt as to soundness. One find Descartes Evil genius, not simply "knocking at the door"---for there is no "door' in the sense Descartes conceived of the world. This kind of talk is rightly dismissed today as nonsense.

And briefly, bringing up Peirce directs me to his complaint about Descartes, that the latter was lost in aimless apriority. But his analysis fails to understand the Cartesian move as a wedding of epistemology and ontology. Descartes thought the cogito was primary because its "ontological proximity" was absolute, and to think this is exactly way to think about epistemology. He was mistaken, but not for reasons Peirce stated. The key to foundational epistemology lies in the intimacy of "presence".

So one is facing a world that is first a construct that makes a world, not a mirror that receives something from beyond itself (again, something that cannot even be conceived in the imagination). As if neuronal activity could be "abou" anything, and worse, about even itself. Physical systems have no epistemic connectivity at all. Consider how the famous naturalist philosopher, Quine, who took up Dewey's chair, committed himself to the premise that the natural world and its physics (from physics, onward to other sciences) entirely failed to explain how meaning, its semiotics, its intentions, anticipations, doubt and affirmation, and so on, can ever be about what physics is talking about. Causality is not even remotely epistemic, that is, there is not even a working paradigm to suggest the possibility.

This is why natural science cannot be philosophy.

So in reality, as living breathing human beings also carving out space in social communities, we of course feel as well as reason. We see as well as measure. It can seem impossible to split off the neurobiological aspects of our semiotic organisation from our socialcultural ones. — apokrisis

Of course, this is right, as long as you don't think neurobiology is a philosophical concept. It "rests on" philosophical assumptions that go unnoticed unless one explicitly thinks this way. Philosophy is about the presuppositions of this kind of talk.

Yet the sensible definition of philosophy is just that. It is the attempt to reach the limit of detachment from the point of view of a creature rooted in embodied subjectivity.

Reasoning still depends on affect as we well know. It feels quite different to be certain vs uncertain. We get a feeling when something clicks and seems right - the aha! response — apokrisis

yes, Dewey's consummatory moment. It is inherently aesthetic. But this has to be recontextualized, out of a naturalist pov and into an existential one. The assumptions of naturalism are undone apriori: the concept of causality simply possesses no epistemic possibility.

But in the interests of fostering philosophical detachment, that is why we have come to lean on the pragmatism of the scientific method. We take claims of feeling convinced out of the equation as much as possible. We invent statistical methods to quantify our proper position on spectrums of certainty-uncertainty. — apokrisis

And IN the statistical occurrent claim there is the "aha!, for all experience has this. It is foundational, and to try to remove this from an what truth is in a philosophical discussion is a little perverse. When we think, we want to be clear, so let us be clear about what truth is and not reduce truth to an abstraction of purely logical clarity. This is a rationalist fallacy.

You have it right when you defend pragmatism's "forward looking" scientific method. But this does not welcome natural science into foundational philosophical thinking. It denies it.

We aim to feel no more strongly about some conviction than that of the response of the click of pattern recognition. We have been presented with some complicated puzzle. There is then some satisfaction in making the last piece fit to complete the whole picture.

So sure, truth isn’t just propositional. AP types got that wrong. Truth comes in its grades of semiosis. The body has to react in ways that are “affective” to be effective in its world.

But then truth as a game being played at the highest level of detached abstraction is understood as “other” to this embodied affectiveness. It is Peirce’s community of reason that aims for objectivity via the cycle of abduction, deduction and inductive confirmation. Make a guess at a general causal relation, deduce the particular logical consequences of that being true, then test to see how those expectations turn out in terms of numbers on dials.

Flickers on needles rather than flickers of the heart are the currency of rational inquiry. — apokrisis

Or, truth needs to be understood as the phenomenon that is there, descriptively available. The categorical universe contrived by reason's essential pragmatic function and definition taken as an exclusive foundation for truth is a fundamental mischaracterization, for this foundation is inherently affective, and clarity in truth recognition is not simply "making ideas clear." It is making the broad scope of experience "clear" and the MOST salient feature of this, is affectivity, and certainly not the very useful movement on a dial in a statistical gathering of information.

We can assign, in the sense of feel, "truth value" in the affective. It has the sense of actuality, of truth in the sense of alethia or revealing (or "unconcealing"). The act-ual is revealed by acting, by affecting.

But this notion of truth is quite different than the idea of propositional truth, which applies only to statements or assertions. — Janus

Is it? When you think at all, thought is attending by feeling, but then, not just this: To say it is attended by feeling is to impose on the experience an order and determination it doesn't have itself. the categorical thought takes up the experience AS a propositional abstraction. It is an abstraction from an unquantifiable source, which is the experience itself, the actuality that presents itself for analysis.The features observed are taken up as categorical.
Kant's Transcendental Unity of Apperception is itself an impossible concept constructed out of the very concepts it is alleged to bring forth. Part of Wittgenstein's complaint in the Tractatus is about this kind of thing, which is why he was such a fan of Kierkegaard.

It is on account of this "revealing" of actuality which is everyday experience (when we notice it) that we can say that everyday experience is (or can be) a revelation. But this has nothing to do with discursive knowledge or explanation, because as soon as the attempt is made to describe this experience in our necessarily dualistic language the original non-duality of the actual is more or less obscured. I say "more or less" because I think the sense of non-duality, of the numinous, although not capable of description, can be evoked by metaphor, by poetic language (and of course by the other arts). — Janus

Or: It has EVERYTHING to do with discursive knowledge, but propositional knowledge is "reduced" to the properties generally understood as essential and exclusive of affectivity imply because the analysis makes it appear this way; and pragmatic rationality, call it, "works" when it is calmly done and reason can proceed in a kind or pure discursivity, free from rhetoric and distracting emotion, and this has real "utility" for getting things right in science and its more mundane setting, everyday living.

But then, to be a good scientist, we have to allow the object before us to stand as it is, which is why I refer to the notion of gelassenheit: one has to yield to the world, observe in earnest, to see what knowledge is, and this observation must be a clear as possible. I witness an occasion of knowledge and I see, as Dewey saw, that affectivity is IN the experience. It is in the "originary" condition. Truth of this and that is abstracting from this original condition for utility's sake. But as it is, as an observable phenomenon, "shown," that is, an original whole.

The reason philosophy is millennia old and still haunts inquiry in same ways it always has is because it has sought propositional knowledge exclusive of substantive affective "meaning". Proportions are pragmatic constructions as well as essential to understand anything, and even essential to being a person at all. But to treat a proposition as a utility, as I am now writing this, philosophically, is a reduction of the world to a utility. And this is Heidegger's big complaint in his Question Concerning Technology.

I think I know what it is to know — Astrophel

If you think you know then you don't know! :smile:

Knowing means understanding clearly and with certainty.
Thinking --in this context and case-- means considering something possible.
These two do not match.

it's not the cogito that grounds knowing because the "I" that thinks remains at a distance from that which is thought. — Astrophel

Indeed it's not thinking that creates knowledge, but not because the reason you give but because thinking and knowledge do not match, as I showed above.
That "the 'I' that thinks remains at a distance from that which is thought" doesn't mean much. You can equally say that I am at a distance from my memories, my emotions, everything created by my mind, consciously or unconsciously, intentionally or unintentionally. Yet, I am connected to them unbreakably. In fact, the thinker is the thought.

"I am" is an ontological claim; "I think" is epistemic. — Astrophel

I agree with the first. I disagree with the second. "Epistemic" means of or relating to knowledge or the conditions for acquiring it. And, as I shown, thinking and knowledge are incompatible concepts.

What Descartes didn't see was that the "Deus deceptor" could indeed still be constructing an illusion — Astrophel

I agree. I have mentioned in here and elsewhere that thinking is not prove that one exists. But I have also thought that maybe by "thinking" Descartes meant "being aware". In which case, he was right.
See, at that time the terms and concepts of "consciousness" and "awareness" were not developed yet.

underlying our knowledge of the world, there is a foundation of intuition — Astrophel

This is a good point you have brought up. It reminds me of what imagination and intuition meant to Einstein in relation to knowledge:

• “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.”
  .
• “I believe in intuition and inspiration. At times I feel certain I am right while not knowing the reason.”

What if it could be said what thought is by what it does? If only this can be done by thinking, then the doing of this is thinking. If I think of, or cognize, a dog as fur, teeth, a tail, a nose, in a certain arrangement, and if fur, teeth, tails and noses represent conceptions I’ve thought, than I should be authorized to say….thought is cognition by means of synthesis of conceptions to each other. And its negation works just as well, insofar as if I cannot connect a set of conceptions to each other, then I have no authority to say I’ve thought anything at all. — Mww

I have no doubt at all that utility lies in the "saying"; or better, the saying lies in utility. Thinking is doing, and I think this right. Is all doing thinking? Implicitly, yes; I would say a cow standing in a meadow "thinks" when it sees taller more tempting grass. A kind of proto thinking, such that the conditional proposition, "I should move over there to access something better," is obviously not in place, but the conditional function is. Symbolic language comes "after," both historically and analytically, this rudimentary relation with the world.

I agree with this idea of cognition as a synthesis. Hard not to, really. But the point I want to make is that this cognition is always conceived apart from its, call it, native setting, and in this conception we are free to think clearly and abstractly, which is good, of course, for the utility requirement put before it. But this runs into what could be called a kind of Kantian fallacy, who in his Transcendental Dialectic argued that reason, left ungrounded in worldly confirmation, moves to inventing metaphysical nonsense: here, I say when reason conceives of what it is to be a "rational truth" according to its own model, it creates an abstraction out of reason. Truth as a philosophical idea requires actual occasions of truth to be revealed for what they are PRIOR to analysis, not after.

Philosophy that seeks Truth with a capital "T" and not just truth in utility based activity. And this Truth is essentially affective, but this is ignored by philosophers, who continually argue as if philosophy's greatest hope is clarity in plain facts. They don't see that what they are really looking for affective clarity in this affair, a consummation of affectivity, which has this powerful dimension to it, the very source of religious fervor and desire.

Philosophy is the very core of religion, to speak loosely.

If you think you know then you don't know! :smile:

Knowing means understanding clearly and with certainty.
Thinking --in this context and case-- means considering something possible.
These two do not match. — Alkis Piskas

No, no; knowing is justified true belief, so says the standard analysis, but it is not wrong. And justification is essential to belief, and justification is inherently thoughtful. Also, if P is true, P is possible. This is analytic.

Indeed it's not thinking that creates knowledge, but not because the reason you give but because thinking and knowledge do not match, as I showed above.
That "the 'I' that thinks remains at a distance from that which is thought" doesn't mean much. You can equally say that I am at a distance from my memories, my emotions, everything created by my mind, consciously or unconsciously, intentionally or unintentionally. Yet, I am connected to them unbreakably. In fact, the thinker is the thought. — Alkis Piskas

When I say the thinking is at a distance, I am a bit outside the familiar discussion. One has to conceive of the cogito as first something as taken to be a rational center, a rational substance "res cogitans" as distinguished from "res extensa." But reason qua reason is just an abstraction and really doesn't exist, I claim. When I say "I" I refer to something, but that thing is supposed to be thought itself, which is nonsense. Not that thought doesn't exist at all, but its existence s discovered the same way other things' existence is discovered: through observation. What does one observe as one observes a thought? It is not only attended by affect, but affect is In the thoughtful observation: one is interested in observing, perhaps fascinated and overwhelmed, perhaps bored, and so on; but knowledge is never free of this. It is inherent to knowledge because knowledge (and thought) is an experience. I follow Dewey and others in this. But I leave aside Dewey's naturalism.

The distance in question is this: in language, the apprehension of things is inherently discursive. A word is not a stand alone entity, thus, when I notice a cow in a field, I am not facing in my understanding anything of a direct disclosure, since the language setting refers or "defers" to other thoughts, memories, feelings, that create a contextual understanding.All thinking and knowledge claims are contextual and not absolute, so if one is thinking at all, and knowing, and knowing is a strictly rationally conceived, then knowing is thereby an abstraction.

Distant from ones memories, etc. is right and wrong. On the hand, there is nothing more intimate than a memory as it rises up before you. It is an event like any other. But the distance is interpretative: when you start talking and thinking about it, what it is and how it is meaningful, you stray from this core experience into language and culture, and this is where Descartes' demon, if you will, inserts doubt, which here I am simply referring to the historical nature of language: language does not give one a direct and spontaneous disclosure; only an historical one, as language itself is a historical construct. It does not "speak" the world "out there".

For this kind of disclosure, one has to look to affectivity, also embedded in language, but then, affectivity "says" something entirely ahistorical: present experience. The historical language "meets" the present in affectivity. Both are essential to thought and knowledge.

I agree with the first. I disagree with the second. "Epistemic" means of or relating to knowledge or the conditions for acquiring it. And, as I shown, thinking and knowledge are incompatible concepts. — Alkis Piskas

You can't say "as shown." It wasn't. All knowledge claims about the world rely on justification and "to think" at all is inherently justificatory. What is the most reliable justification? this lies in the conditions of immediacy. A little like Plato's critique of art as their removed from their source, the forms. Well, I am no metaphysician like Plato, but where he puts the forms, I put intuited encounters with expereince, like a mysterious punch in the face, if you will: who did this? Why? Where is he?; and so on. But then pain, well, there is no discursivity of inquiry here. It may be taken up discursively, but pain qua pain is not.

Pain, affectivity being a general term for this dimension of our existence, is nondiscursive, and affectivity brings reason in line with actuality. To know is to feel, in other words. Again, feeling does not attend knowing. It IS the knowing. The distinctions drawn between the two are analytic and abstract and pragmatic.

I agree. I have mentioned in here and elsewhere that thinking is not prove that one exists. But I have also thought that maybe by "thinking" Descartes meant "being aware". In which case, he was right.
See, at that time the terms and concepts of "consciousness" and "awareness" were not developed yet. — Alkis Piskas

I think his "res cogitans" answers this. Thought qua thought is an independent kind of existing "thing." We are this.

This is a good point you have brought up. It reminds me of what imagination and intuition meant to Einstein in relation to knowledge:
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.”
.
“I believe in intuition and inspiration. At times I feel certain I am right while not knowing the reason.” — Alkis Piskas

But then, Einstein wasn't doing philosophy. To imagine is to bring forth established knowledge claims, often, in novel ways, and this is a creative imagining, which is what I think he was talking about. A better understanding of imagination would be an "openness": all of our thinking and knowledge claims are open to possibilities, and none are shut, which is dogmatism. i am claiming that there is a foundational nostalgia for closure, and this should be understood not simply as a rational quest for a proposition.al satisfaction. What inquiry qua inquiry seeks is a union between epistemology and ontology.