smcder
Paranormal Adept
Source?
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Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 8
- Thread starter Gene Steinberg
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Michael Allen
Paranormal Adept
It doesn't take much trickery with words and syntax to muddle a notion--which is probably why Schopenhauer considered Hegel mostly nonsense. However I think there are subtle lessons to be learned.
To apply "identity" as a relation between "thought" and "being" unfortunately ends the discussion (if following the normal rules and procedures...i.e. semantics and meaning) because we end up with what appears to be nothing more than a vacuous "it is what it is" truism.
"Absolute Knowledge" ambiguously divides into knowledge obtained within the framework of the absolute (or totality) or could be "absolute" (different sense) "knowledge of the absolute."
I think this is where people like Schopenhauer tune out and begin from scratch...and I don't blame them.
Instead there are some who will continue to have a fetish over what is fundamentally unattainable by an embodied self within the world from which they emerged. You are right to consider the "philosophers of math" at this point...tis precisely the point Kurt Godel indicated in his famous "Incompleteness" theorem and to some extent is illustrated in microcosm as "this sentence I am saying is false."
At this point I don't have much else to add that will be meaningful to expand my (or your) understanding ... there are many thoughts floating in my head right now and they are all arguing with each other
smcder
Paranormal Adept
It doesn't take much trickery with words and syntax to muddle a notion--which is probably why Schopenhauer considered Hegel mostly nonsense. However I think there are subtle lessons to be learned.
To apply "identity" as a relation between "thought" and "being" unfortunately ends the discussion (if following the normal rules and procedures...i.e. semantics and meaning) because we end up with what appears to be nothing more than a vacuous "it is what it is" truism.
"Absolute Knowledge" ambiguously divides into knowledge obtained within the framework of the absolute (or totality) or could be "absolute" (different sense) "knowledge of the absolute."
I think this is where people like Schopenhauer tune out and begin from scratch...and I don't blame them.
Instead there are some who will continue to have a fetish over what is fundamentally unattainable by an embodied self within the world from which they emerged. You are right to consider the "philosophers of math" at this point...tis precisely the point Kurt Godel indicated in his famous "Incompleteness" theorem and to some extent is illustrated in microcosm as "this sentence I am saying is false."
At this point I don't have much else to add that will be meaningful to expand my (or your) understanding ... there are many thoughts floating in my head right now and they are all arguing with each other
Incompleteness theorem(s) -plural - there are two.
Michael Allen
Paranormal Adept
I was referring to section 75
I am going to post the A.V Miller translation because I think it is clearer:
"This conclusion [MA: i.e. the wrong one...keep that in mind] from the fact that the Absolute alone is true, or truth alone is absolute"
This I think is an apparent fact to those who make the wrong conclusion, Hegel (believe it or not) has a sense of humor
"One may set this aside on the ground that there is a type of cognition which, though it does not cognize the Absolute as Science aims to, is still true, and that cognition in general, though it be incapable of grasping the Absolute, is still capable of grasping other kinds of truth."
This is Hegelian reductio ad absurdum operating a full force...read him like you would Jon Stewart.
"But we gradually come to see that this kind of talk which goes back and forth only leads to a hazy distinction between an absolute truth and some other kind of truth, and..."
Here comes the final nail ...
"...that words like 'absolute', 'cognition', etc presuppose a meaning which has yet to be ascertained."
Fast forward to Heidegger and allow him to interject Hegel
"...yes, but what if the actions of the speaker already show the perfect meaning to be ascertained? Hmmm?"
Michael Allen
Paranormal Adept
I will post J.N Findlay's Paraphrase on section 76 which I find illuminating:
76. All these confused conceptions which make knowledge [appear] inherently impossible must be dismissed // I have interpolated "appear" because Hegel's whole point is that it is possible--through the process of living.
: The actual development of knowledge itself sets them aside // No one questions the making of a thing once it is useful -- development here is "trial and errror"
But knowledge in its first appearance is itself merely apparent [now you understand my interpolation above] and so defective // I want to place another [apparent] here before "defective", but I will refrain.
Science cannot merely claim to be better than such apparent knowledge, for this is to put itself on the level of the latter and to rely on its mere existence.
Nor can it appeal to its own rudimentary presence in apparent knowledge, for this is not, in apparent knowledge, specially distinctive.
... long story short, Science watches the unfolding of these moments in apparent knowledge and in its emergence represents the process of revealing the mysteries of being and consciousness to the embodied self.
(78) second paragraph:
"The series of configurations which consciousness goes through along this road is , in reality, the detailed history of the education of consciousness itself to the standpoint of Science"
...
(79) "The necessary progression and interconnection of the forms of the unreal consciousness will by itself bring to pass the completion of the series."
Simply put "the fool who persists in his folly will become wise."
76. All these confused conceptions which make knowledge [appear] inherently impossible must be dismissed // I have interpolated "appear" because Hegel's whole point is that it is possible--through the process of living.
: The actual development of knowledge itself sets them aside // No one questions the making of a thing once it is useful -- development here is "trial and errror"
But knowledge in its first appearance is itself merely apparent [now you understand my interpolation above] and so defective // I want to place another [apparent] here before "defective", but I will refrain.
Science cannot merely claim to be better than such apparent knowledge, for this is to put itself on the level of the latter and to rely on its mere existence.
Nor can it appeal to its own rudimentary presence in apparent knowledge, for this is not, in apparent knowledge, specially distinctive.
... long story short, Science watches the unfolding of these moments in apparent knowledge and in its emergence represents the process of revealing the mysteries of being and consciousness to the embodied self.
(78) second paragraph:
"The series of configurations which consciousness goes through along this road is , in reality, the detailed history of the education of consciousness itself to the standpoint of Science"
...
(79) "The necessary progression and interconnection of the forms of the unreal consciousness will by itself bring to pass the completion of the series."
Simply put "the fool who persists in his folly will become wise."
Michael Allen
Paranormal Adept
I very much like the thread requesting a comparison between the asserted independence of 'god' and 'mathematics,' respectively
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I think you should 'comment' on your view that Schopenhauer provides merely "a few rays of common sense." That is, if you see Schopenhauer's contributions as trivial when you set him alongside your view of Hegel's philosophy, please do tell us more. In your now proceeding to provide interpretations of parts of Hegel's Introduction to The Phenomenology of Spirit (including Findlay's, which I am now also reading), you take us to a core issue in epistemology with which we have been struggling all along in this thread, and I for one hope we can develop a discussion of it. Last night I copied out this interpretation by Findlay of the significance of section 75 of Hegel's introduction:
…"75. That we might have knowledge of a sort, e.g. of phenomena, but not of what absolutely is, is a wholly obscure notion to which no one has managed to give any clear meaning. (Even knowledge of Schein or Erscheinung, Hegel is later to insist, is knowledge- of how things really appear to be or manifestly are.)”
Let's follow this thread in Hegel and also in Schopenhauer and then into phenomenological philosophy proper. Why don't we all read Hegel's introduction itself and try together to work out its meaning, which seems to me at this point to anticipate existential phenomenology as more fully developed in the 20th century?
Michael Allen
Paranormal Adept
A tall order since I am myself often thrown into confusion trying to parse out Hegel. I think one good start may be looking into some of Heidegger's commentaries and analyses of Hegel. Regarding Schopenhaur, I did not mean to imply his contributions are 'trivial'...but to contribute a commentary on his role in the advancement of philosophy will require additional digging and reading on my part.
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In other words, it is an understanding of the development of phenomenological philosophy -- most fully expressed by Merleau-Ponty -- that we need to accomplish before we can move beyond the entrapments of radical dualism that haunts early modern philosophy including Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and others. The paper/chapter at the following link should be helpful in clarifying the phenomenological movement beyond classical dualism:
Glen A. Mazis, Time at the Depth of the World
https://philpapers.org/archive/MAZQAT.pdf
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Soupie
Paranormal Adept
The Archdruid Report: The World as Will
"For our present purposes, though, we can set that aside and focus on the body as the part of the world each of us encounters in a twofold way: as a representation among representations, and as a means of expression for the will. Everything we perceive about our bodies is a representation, but by noticing these representations, we observe the action of something that isn’t a representation, something we call the will, manifesting in its various grades. That’s all there is. Go looking as long as you want, says Schopenhauer, and you won’t find anything but will and representations. What if that’s all there is—if the thing we call "matter" is simpy the most basic grade of the will, and everything in the world thus amounts to will on the one hand, and representations experienced by that mode of will we call consciousness on the other, and the thing that representations are representing are various expressions of this one energy that, by way of its distinctive manifestations in our own experience, we call the will?
That’s Schopenhauer’s vision. The remarkable thing is how close it is to the vision that comes out of modern science. A century before quantum mechanics, he’d already grasped that behind the facade of sensory representations that you and I call matter lies an incomprehensible and insubstantial reality, a realm of complex forces dancing in the void. Follow his arguments out to their logical conclusion and you get a close enough equivalent of the universe of modern physics that it’s not at all implausible that they’re one and the same. Of course plausibility isn’t proof—but given the fragile, dependent, and derivative nature of the human intellect, it may be as close as we can get.
And of course that latter point is a core reason why Arthur Schopenhauer spent most of his life in complete obscurity and why, after a brief period of mostly posthumous superstardom in the late nineteenth century, his work dropped out of sight and has rarely been noticed since. (To be precise, it’s one of two core reasons; we’ll get to the other one later.) If he’s right, then the universe is not rational. Reason—the disciplined use of the grade of will I’ve called the intellect—isn’t a key to the truth of things. It’s simply the systematic exploitation of a set of habits of mind that turned out to be convenient for our ancestors as they struggled with the hard but intellectually undemanding tasks of staying fed, attracting mates, chasing off predators, and the like, and later on got pulled out of context and put to work coming up with complicated stories about what causes the representations we experience."
@Constance Based on the Archdruid's characterization of Schopenhauer's thinking, he provides a way past dualism. A way that began with Kant's recognizing the distinction between phenomena and noumena. So I would think Kant had moved beyond dualism as well.
"For our present purposes, though, we can set that aside and focus on the body as the part of the world each of us encounters in a twofold way: as a representation among representations, and as a means of expression for the will. Everything we perceive about our bodies is a representation, but by noticing these representations, we observe the action of something that isn’t a representation, something we call the will, manifesting in its various grades. That’s all there is. Go looking as long as you want, says Schopenhauer, and you won’t find anything but will and representations. What if that’s all there is—if the thing we call "matter" is simpy the most basic grade of the will, and everything in the world thus amounts to will on the one hand, and representations experienced by that mode of will we call consciousness on the other, and the thing that representations are representing are various expressions of this one energy that, by way of its distinctive manifestations in our own experience, we call the will?
That’s Schopenhauer’s vision. The remarkable thing is how close it is to the vision that comes out of modern science. A century before quantum mechanics, he’d already grasped that behind the facade of sensory representations that you and I call matter lies an incomprehensible and insubstantial reality, a realm of complex forces dancing in the void. Follow his arguments out to their logical conclusion and you get a close enough equivalent of the universe of modern physics that it’s not at all implausible that they’re one and the same. Of course plausibility isn’t proof—but given the fragile, dependent, and derivative nature of the human intellect, it may be as close as we can get.
And of course that latter point is a core reason why Arthur Schopenhauer spent most of his life in complete obscurity and why, after a brief period of mostly posthumous superstardom in the late nineteenth century, his work dropped out of sight and has rarely been noticed since. (To be precise, it’s one of two core reasons; we’ll get to the other one later.) If he’s right, then the universe is not rational. Reason—the disciplined use of the grade of will I’ve called the intellect—isn’t a key to the truth of things. It’s simply the systematic exploitation of a set of habits of mind that turned out to be convenient for our ancestors as they struggled with the hard but intellectually undemanding tasks of staying fed, attracting mates, chasing off predators, and the like, and later on got pulled out of context and put to work coming up with complicated stories about what causes the representations we experience."
@Constance Based on the Archdruid's characterization of Schopenhauer's thinking, he provides a way past dualism. A way that began with Kant's recognizing the distinction between phenomena and noumena. So I would think Kant had moved beyond dualism as well.
Michael Allen
Paranormal Adept
For those interested...my youtube channel:
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Sent from my SM-G900V using Tapatalk
It would be interesting to find out whether Kant scholars and contemporary philosophers think Kant moved beyond dualism. My impression is that he didn't, but I haven't read most of Kant. It seems that Schopenhauer did not overcome dualism either, though he pointed the way toward the experiential grounds on which phenomenology ultimately does so.
Randall
J. Randall Murphy
Why would that be interesting?
smcder
Paranormal Adept
According to this, Kant's final position was one of skepticism:
Kant, Immanuel - Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind
Randall
J. Randall Murphy
Sums up this thread perfectly.
This paper should help out at this point re Kant:
Andreas Weber and Francisco J. Varela, Life after Kant: Natural purposes and the autopoietic foundations of biological individuality
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 1: 97–125, 2002.
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/de0f/985831359e84894c86b68d455bcad8b69032.pdf
Andreas Weber and Francisco J. Varela, Life after Kant: Natural purposes and the autopoietic foundations of biological individuality
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 1: 97–125, 2002.
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/de0f/985831359e84894c86b68d455bcad8b69032.pdf
Is the unfinished Ravel piece in your playlist? Also how to access your playlist? Thanks.
Because we have long struggled in this thread with the mind-body problem and looked for possibilities of its resolution in understanding consciousness, and because @Soupie raised the question whether Kant might have overcome dualism, and because two centuries of Kant scholars have not been able to agree on the interpretation of Kant's philosophy.
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