Jan:
My E-Mail Software told me I had to split this int two messages.
This is the first half.
In a message dated 17/11/2004 01:48:29 GMT Standard Time, [email protected]_
(mailto:janstr@xxxxxxx) writes: Hi Jud, you wrote:
Jan:
I understand and recognize your lack of time, it's the same with me, and the
rest of us I guess, we never know how much time is left for us here below.
Jud:
Hahahah! Jan, that sounds as if there's an *above* as well as a *below?*
For me there is only the below - for I would certainly feel out of place
*above.* ;-)
Jan:
But in philosophy, I think, historical awareness is and will always remain
of importance, because the basic philosophical questions, f. i. what is being,
what is matter, what is time, who/what is man, what is knowledge, what is
living well? etc., never get old and outdated. What earlier philosophers
thought and said shape the context of our current views, point to further
directions or show us their mistakes and gaps, and also the possible 'hidden'
questions. With regard to the 'hard' sciences, I agree, historical aspects are less
urgent, because development in science is of an eliminative nature, today
nobody will still adhere to Aristotle's cosmology, or Descartes' optica, or the
theory of phlogiston.
Jud:
I agree with all you say here. [except for the *below/above* bit of course.
;-) You are perfectly correct that it is important to add to our knowledge by
the study of the old timers, but my emphasis has always been that of
thinking for myself based upon my own experience, an experience which of course
includes reading the old timers. But some folks [not you] tend to get the
emphasis out of kilter and allow the old timers do their thinking for them, and are
constantly quoting them, [the more the merrier that can be packed onto the
page the better it seems] apparently in the mistaken belief that they are
appealing to some sort of *authority* and in doing so, appear to believe that
others will associate the old timer's authority with them and it will *rub off on
them* in some weird way.
Cut:
THE great divide between the two - although in many cases this separation is
a blurred one.
Jan:
The fact that materialists use or postulate abstractions in their thinking
and experimentations is very much a necessity of their whole endeavor. To make
their discoveries they formulate hypotheses containing some expected
abstract quality or property of certain (un)known phenomena, to test them in
experimental settings. Highly abstract concepts as mass, gravity, energy, light etc.
have guided and informed scientific practices throughout the ages; they were
first rationally guessed and postulated and later empirically confirmed to
exist. A materialist ontology can never do without abstractions, because they
are the life blood of their ongoing conjectures and investigations. The
abstract concepts of today may lead to the newly discovered phenomena of tomorrow.
Jud:
As I have been saying for years, I have no argument with the acknowledgement
and use of abstractions by science or anybody else - as long as they are
RECOGNISED as necessary pretences which are vital for the mensuration,
comparison, identification, delineation and the description of entities and their
behaviour, and are not referred to as entities or quasi-entities in themselves.
The *senses* and *pain* for example are convenient ways of describing and
identifying bodily/biological problems of existential modality, but *pain* and
the *senses* do not actually exist per se. I simply don't believe in these
ancient dualisms. Why on earth do people want to split the human holism up into
two dollops? There is not a scrap of evidence for its existence of *mind* or
*consciousness?* I can identify a conscious human being easily, and I can
also identify a guy who has been knocked down by a bus and is unconscious - but
his *consciousness and his unconsciousness* don't exist - only the guy
exists in this state or that. In my ontology there is no: *me,* as opposed to, or
in contradistinction to the *it* of *my body.*
Yes, *You and I* form a dualism, but *me and my body* and its modalities do
not. For me *pain* doesn't exist - only my painful knee painfully exists as
part of the holism with the painful knee that is me. So IMO the senses do not
exist - only the sensors and the sensorising holism actually exist. There is
no duality between the entity that is in a certain location and its *being
there. * An entity simply exists in a certain place. There can be no individual
*Dasein, * because *being there* is simply the modality of an entity which
happens to be in a certain location which we decide to be identified as *THERE*
rather than *HERE. * In other words *Dasein* cannot be an actual or real
subject - because *Dasein* is not an entity - Dasein is what an individual
entity DOES.
*Dasein* cannot be here, there and everywhere at the same time because (A)
if it DID exist it would be an individual, and (B) an individual can only be in
one place at a time. Nothing can exist as an entitic plurality - it can only
exist as a singularity.
Jud: [earlier]
Materialism is not doctrinal
Jan:
Jud, there are doctrinal transcendentalists as there are doctrinal
materialists, as there are non-doctrinal transcendentalists etc., but these doctrinal
and dogmatic aspects or tendencies lie in the closure and fixedness of their
respective theories. Marx, in a certain sense, was a true dogmatist, for
instance in his denial of the right of private property or because he believed
his theory of historical materialism predicted the only possible way of the
development of the capitalist society.
Jud:
It is impossible to be *non-doctrinal transcendentalist* for it is precisely
these doctrinal and dogmatic aspects or tendencies and cognitive closures
and fixities of belief which are accepted by them as being authoritative. If
they did not accept these doctrines, then they would not be perceived or
classed as *transcendentalists*. Marx it is true was dogmatic, and believed that
property was robbery etc. That position is too extreme for me. I believe that
society should control the amount of property that an individual is allowed to
own, but that to ban all private property would be a disaster.
Jan:
Heidegger certainly is not a dogmatic transcendentalist imo, because his
transcendentalism (i. e. his transcendental questioning) never comes to a
concluding finish, he keeps going on searching, repeating the old questions in a
new light, never satisfied with his provisional answers, always on the way,
trying and reaching for the hidden and the forgotten.
Jud:
For me he represents the arch-dogmatist who took the dogma of *Being* for
granted and unquestioningly. Funny, he also comes across to me as being
hectoring and wooden in his style - I particularly resented his non-questioning of
*Being, * and his treatment of it as a *given. * His thinking appears to me as
being not stripped down enough - as being *crude* and *unsophisticated* and
*corpulent* and *fleshy* and *overblown. * In other words his *Basic
Concepts* are not *basic* at all, and should really be re-named: *Basic Suppositions,
* or *Being and the Cognitive Processes of Ontological Conjecture.*
Jan:
Look at SuZ for instance, at first sight it seems a grand composition aimed
at answering the question of Being, in the being of being-man. Yet he never
finished it, could not finish it, because he discovered that no definite
doctrines or fixed dogmata could shed light on the hidden essence of man as
Dasein. [cf. Das Da-sein als die Wesung der Lichtung des Sichverbergens gehoert zu
diesem Sichverbergen selbst, das als das Er-eignis west. BzP: 297]
Jud:
He could have saved himself a lot of time and hard work by beginning the
book differently. He could have first of all started by asking the question:
*Is *Being* a viable actuality worth questioning as a *problem, * which has
been *forgotten, or is it just a primitive fiction?
The query: *Why do we think there is such a notion as *Being, * how did this
notion come about? Who said that there is such a thing as: *the Question of
*Being* in the first place - and WHY? What was *in it* for him? This sort
of basic questioning is completely absent from the pages of *Being and Time. *
Jan:
You keep coming back on the fact that Heidegger's language and neologisms is
such an outrage, but look at Plato's and Aristotle's most unheard and
'brutal' use of the Greek language [cf. SuZ: 39]
Jud:
They had an excuse - they lived over 2000 years ago and were not privy to
the knowledge we have nowadays. BTW, We are supposed to believe that they were
breaking new ground, which is something I very much doubt, for they inherited
a lot from their predecessors and also their contemporaries. That is not to
disparage them in any way. Later they, [Plato and Aristotle] were both
extremely important to Christianity, which makes one immediately suspicious of them
and their ideas. To be accepted by Christianity is the kiss of death
philosophically. Heidegger's neologisms were for the most part re-jigged and
re-packaged Germanifications of earlier naive neologisms.
Jan:
And also look at the language of our modern physicists, they talk about
quarks, baryons, neutrinos, axions, fotinos, and anti-quarks, anti-baryons etc.
Jud:
These are just nouns to describe entities - nothing mysterious or abstract
involved - just like calling a London bus a *London bus.*
Jan:
Why not grant our philosophers the same freedom, especially when they claim
to enter new ontological territories?
Jud:
Because they have a habit of attributing quasi-actuality to abstractions
where there is no actuality involved, either actual or quasi-actual. One can
call it a harmless and slightly dotty *let's pretend philosophy, * or provide
the harsher version, the one which Rene light-heartedly calls that sort of
thing - *Lies. *
I don't believe for one moment that Heideggerians are deceivers - for me
they are simply misled, and because of that [IMO] they are wasting their
intellectual lives - but some people waste their lives or pass the time in ballroom
dancing or collecting bird's eggs, so who are we to criticise?
Jud {earlier]:
I am, of necessity, generalising of course, but whereas normally a
materialist explains every apparent instance of a mental phenomenon as a feature of
some physical object, my type of nominalist would say that the word *feature*
is a cop-out, and that neither the mental nor the phenomenal exist, but only
the human holism exists.
Jan:
But do you mean to say here that "the human holism" is an entity that
exists, but without any mental capacities and unable to perceive any phenomena?
What then is the human holism made of?
Jud:
You exist as an intelligent mentaliser Jan - but it is the mentalising
[thinking] Jan that exists not Jan's mentalising [thinking.]
Jan blinks his eyes, but the blinking doesn't exist - the blinking Jan
exists in an existential modality of blinking. The human holism, like anything
else in the cosmos, consists of collections of cells, atoms, energo-molecules. I
have many materialist friends who would say for example that: *process*
actually exists, whilst I would claim that only the entities which exist in what
we humans would describe as: *being situated in certain spatial and contiguous
relationships* exist.
Jan:
In what sense does a (spatial and contiguous) relationship exist?
Jud:
Spatial and contiguous relationships do not exist - only the entities which
are localised in spatial positions and which are considered by humans to be
close to, or far from other entities exist. What we consider comprises the
abstractions *close* or *far* is the subject of another discussion.
It is a lot easier to type the six-letter word * Matter* rather than the
longer: *That which has mass and occupies space * or *the actually entitic, * or
*that which exists in the manner of a force field, * etc.
Jan:
Imho you are only substituting the abstraction "matter" with other
abstractions as "mass", "space", "force", "field"; it's a gain, I agree, but not one
in favour of supporting your *eliminative* nominalism, which here seems more
like going in the direction of an accumulative nominalism?
Jud:
You make some good points here Jan. "Matter," mass", "space", "force",
"field"; etc., are all abstractions. The main reason I single out *matter* as an
abstraction is didactic in the sense that I hope to draw people's attention to
a major rift between the materialist and the eliminative nominalist. People
automatically expect extreme nominalists to accept *matter* forgetting that
for a nominalist *matter* is a meaningless universal. As for the rest of them:
"Time, "mass", "space", "force", "field"; I reject all of them as
abstractions. However as long as people are aware that nominalists reject them as
non-entities, then it is perfectly OK for nominalists to use the words as
shortcuts in an elliptical manner. The last thing a eliminative nominalist wants is
to be accused of believing that "Time, "Being," "mass", "space", "force",
"field"; actually EXIST, and that they are anything more than non-existent
constructs of the human mind for benign, [and/or in the case of *Being* malign]
purposes.
Jan:
Of course there is nothing wrong with using abstract shortcuts and
conventions in our conversations, we all do, whether we are nominalists, materialists
or transcendentalists. The question however is: why do we use them? It is
because language is inherently an imperfect medium, or because we as human
beings are imperfect language users, or is it that the world (the reality, the
phenomena) we try to grasp and communicate to each other, is of such a nature
that we necessary need abstractions, because the whole reality where we live in
contains existing abstractions too?
Jud:
More good questions/points. We use them mainly to save time. To say: *I am
going dancing tonight* is a lot shorter than saying:
*I am travelling by car [instead of *going*] to move my body to a musical
accompaniment in a formalised series of movements [dancing] when the earth has
turned away from the sun [tonight] * [It is IMO] nothing to do with language
being *imperfect* or not *developed* enough to describe these activities.
Words such as *reality* are just stand-in words for: *that which is real, * and
the word phenomena* is a short cut or stand in word for: *entities as they
appear to us. * Plainly there is nothing which is not an entity, and only that
which is an entity can be detected by our sensors. The *imagination* is
simply a compendium of memories of pre-sensorialised entities stored in the brain
tissues, drawn upon, manifested and re-jigged in various juxtapositions to
achieve certain effects.
Jan:
I believe and have argued many times before, that what exists in the world
is not ultimately exhausted by nor can be reduced to material or energetic
entities only.
Jud:
Where and what is your evidence for this belief Jan? Can you give me an
example of some phenomenon which cannot be reduced to material or energetic an
entity?
Jan:
Matter and energy are only a part of the world; non-material beings as time,
(empty) space, ideas, words, concepts, emotions, creativity, birth and death
etc. are equally existential and constitutive elements of our world, because
without the existence of these non-material beings we could not sufficiently
explain and understand phenomena as change, difference, becoming,
appearance, illusion etc.
Jud:
The term: *non-material being* doesn't make sense - how can something be a
being if it is not a something? To be a being is to BE something the verb *BE*
is the root of the verb *being* To be a being is to exist in actuality; have
life or reality. The state or quality of having existence, a living entity.
How on earth can things be beings when they are not beings? Where is the
evidence for these *non-beings? * Who was the first person to make these claims
that something that doesn't exist exists, and why do/did people believe him?
[Whoever he was} There is absolutely nothing in what you mention above that
cannot be explained using the eliminativistic nominalist ontology Jan. Ideas,
words, concepts, emotions, creativity are simply existential states and
modalities of ideating, communicating, emotional, creative human entities [holisms].
Birth is just a name we give to the existential act of a female separating
from the individual entity that is her offspring. Death is a change of
existential modality, when a human entity ceases to be in the state that we call
*living. * *Space* is an area that humans designate as being unoccupied by
entities - though this concept is undergoing dramatic change with the theory of
*dark matter* etc. *Time* is the name we give to the interval we humans
perceive to be *between* entitic interactions.
Jan:
One of the weaknesses of nominalism and 'crude' materialism is that when
they are asked to explain the possibility of 'change, difference and novelty'
without the use of non-material beings, they resort to transcendental phenomena
[see f. i. Ockham's omnipotent God; or your transcendental tautology that "X
exists as X"].
Jud:
I personally feel uncomfortable and do not wish to be associated with *crude
materialism. * Whilst I have great respect for Ockham, be was handicapped
with the problem of having to reconcile his theology with his nominalism or
risk being burnt alive at the stake.. I am not handicapped with such
restrictions. If you can prove that an entity doesn't exist in the way it exists then
you will be the new Leonardo de Vinci. As a matter of interest Jan, DO you
contest the fact that entities exist in the way that they exist? As I grab the
coffee mug on my desk THUS - it is obvious to me that it MUST exist in the way
that it exists, and also my hand that grabs it also exists in the way that
it exists. What is *transcendental* about that? If I drop my mug on the floor
and smash it then what remains of it will still exist in the way that it
exists - it will not exist in the way that it formerly existed, and it will not
exist in the way that it will exist next Tuesday will it?
Jud
It is made of wood and graphite.
Jan:
I agree, your pen is made of wood and graphite, but wood and graphite are
still nominalistic materialist abstractions, because wood is made up of
molecules, atoms, particles etc.; there is no rockbottom of material ultimata to
which the 'nomos' of the nominalist could un-ambigiously refer to in any
concrete and definite sense. There are no 'atomistic' words or propositions that
perfectly refer, point to or picture a factual state of the (material) world.
Jud:
More good points. I could create a long and torturous sentence along the
lines of: That entity which I refer to as *my pen* consists of collections of
molecules and force-fields of a type which we humans characterise appertaining
to *wood* and *graphite. * Now nominalists usually try to *keep pace* with
science in the sense of the designations and characterisations of quantum
physics, and though there are new introductions of particulates as more and more
are discovered, most people are willing to accept the more widely known current
ones of molecules, atoms, particles, quarks, protons, neutrons, leptons,
electrons, anti-electrons, neutrinos, tau neutrinos, lambdas, muons, baryons,
mesons, photons, gluons and etc. Presumably it would be possible to provide a
fairly accurate description of the type of wood used in the production of my
pencil and the physical nature of the graphite which provides the *lead* which
makes the marks upon the paper - but what is the point? It is the principle
that counts, and the principle is that any philosopher worth his salt should
make himself aware of the REAL nature of entities and describe then in a way
which is closest to the current understanding of mankind in these matters.
Jan:
As Wittgenstein argued, in his critique on logical atomism and nominalism,
language has no logical depth-structure, which in a *one to one* way would
picture or mirror the (logical) structure of the material world. Words and names
refer to, and derive their meaning from other words and names, language-use
is more like playing a game with various (local, provisional, non logical)
rules; words and sentences relate to each other more like members of a certain
family, to understand the meaning of a word is to see it played out and
placed in a whole of family resemblance's [cf. PU: §64-77].
Jud:
I disagree with Wittgenstein on this matter. His *logical depth structure*
is a meaningless abstraction. If I point to a cat and utter the word *cat*
there is no misunderstanding on your part that I am linking the phonemes K -A -
T with the mewing furry animal before us. If I took you to a remote jungle
clearing in the Amazon rain forest and introduced you to a painted tribesman and
pointed to his blowpipe and pronounced the word *tergat* you would
immediately understand that the blowpipe was known by that word in the language of the
Indian society of which he was a member. You would grasp this message
WITHOUT you previously knowing even one word of his language. You would have NO
NEED to derive the meaning of *tergat* from other words and names used by the
forest-dwellers who spoke that language. The language games that people play
are played with ABSTRACTIONS mostly and hardly ever with proper nouns.
Jan:
Wittgenstein's argument is in fact quite simple. Language he claims has no
logical ground-structure, because words and concepts (i. e. the basic
ingredients of language) can not uniquely be defined in a finite description of
necessary and sufficient conditions. Let's look at some examples: if f. i. we take
the concept "atom" physicists will agree at some provisional definition of
this object, but it is not a fixed definition because it depends on the current
(fallible) state of our theories of physics and on ongoing discoveries we
continually do in our laboratories.
Jud:
OK, but what is wrong with that? It depends on the contextual circumstances
and the implicature involved regarding the conversation is taking place. In a
general discussion amongst the non-scientific, the employment of the word
*atom* would be sufficient to communicate the simple idea of what was being
described. In context, if you told me I consisted of billions of atoms, I would
understand you and concur with your observation without a murmur. At a
conference of physicists to use the word *atom* would not be precise enough, and
they would use other words which better described the area of research with
which they were engaged in discussing. What is wrong with that? When new
molecules are discovered and identified they are given new names, as new stars are
discovered they are given names - this is all good healthy nominalisation -
what's wrong with that? Don't you think that trannies like Wittgenstein are a
bit passé for these days - a bit *old hat?*
Jan:
If we take a look at the word "mind" we see the same problem. How do we use
this word in our everyday conversations? There seem to be infinite ways to
use it in a meaningful sense, f.i. When I say, "I am of two minds", or "he has
a very good mind", or "something slipped my mind" every time I used the word
"mind" in a different meaning.
Jud:
For me it is quite simple - *mind* is a complete nonsense - and abstraction
- it simply doesn't exist. The fact that human beings use such terms and
metaphors and figures of speech as PITS [people on the street] use them, does not
mean that *mind* is magically actualised by such metaphors. The fact that a
millions screaming Moslems or Christians or Hindus or Jews believe that *God*
exists doesn't automatically mean that such an imaginary notion is actually
real, and that which corresponds to the million names for *God* actually
exists FOR REAL.
Jan:
Or take the concept "game", what is a "game”? Can we construct a definition
that conveys all possible games? There are board-games, outdoor games,
collective games, solitary games, games with no winner etc. etc. And also for
something as simple as a chair; can we formulate a conclusive definition of what a
"chair" is?
Jud:
That is just a typical waggish Wittgensteinian time-waster. There is no
problem with this *game* question. YES we CANNOT formulate a conclusive
definition of what a "chair" is [unless like Plato we believe that there is a
definitive draft of such an object floating around in the wild-blue yonder] or of
whatever any other entity in the cosmos is, because it would take the first
million years to describe what one of the upholstery pins was like, and by the
time we were finished we would have to start all over again for it would have
changed. Any observed object changes every millisecond and if you are looking
at a chair and say *chair* the chair is not the same object that it was before
you uttered the word *chair. * It's like a new car - the moment you drive
out of the showroom it becomes *second-hand. * ;-)
In fact the upholstery-pin under observation would be in CONSTANT change, so
it wouldn't even be worth starting to PROPERLY describe it. THEN, due to the
fact that our sensorial equipment is not good enough, our description would
not coincide with the actual way in which the entity was existing. THAT is the
main reason why Husserl's and Heidegger's uploading of the *Being* of
beings, via the mechanism of *object givenness* falls flat on its face - the
process of *object givenness* is basically uploading a load of individualised
ontological crap, and there is no Daseinic universal of the *Being* of a cow. For
millions of individual Daseins on one side of the world it is a stupid animal
only fit for eating, milking and making glue out of, and on the other side
of the world millions of duskier-coloured Daseins worship the ground it walks
upon, and walk behind it picking up its droppings and praying to them as holy
entities.
If I say to you: *Jan, you and I are going to play a game. * I know
perfectly well what the reply is going to be from you: *What kind of game Jud? * If
we are both interested we can identify the kind of game that I have in mind.
*A card game? * OK *what sort of card game? * etc. We have NO NEED, or there
is no COMMUNICATIONAL REQUIREMENT to identify the game in any more detail
than that which is necessary for us both to agree with the nature of the cards
or dice we use, and the rules of the game. As long as there is mutual
agreement on cards and rules we can proceed.
Jan:
A table can be a chair, a box can be a chair, a rock can be a chair, a pile
of books can be a chair, a cow can be a chair (yes, I have seen farmers who
were sitting on a cow when she layed resting in the stable) etc.
Jud:
NO - you are wrong Jan. A table can be used in the manner usually rendered
by a chair, a box can be can be used in the manner usually supplied by a
chair, a rock can be can be used in the manner usually afforded by a chair, a pile
of books can be can be used in the manner usually catered for by a chair, a
cow can be can be used in the manner usually provided by a chair - but you
couldn't sit at a low table on a cow and have lunch in McDonald's. Furthermore,
a chair cannot be used in the manner usually provided by a rock, [you cannot
build the Hoover Dam out of chairs] and a chair cannot be used in the manner
usually provided by a cow, [you cannot milk a chair] and a chair cannot be
used in the manner usually provided by a book, [you cannot read a chair as you
sit on an aeroplane heading for Timbuktu.]
End of Part One.
Regards,
Jud
Personal Website:
_http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/index.htm_
(http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/index.htm)
E-mail Discussion List:
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--- from list heidegger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---
My E-Mail Software told me I had to split this int two messages.
This is the first half.
In a message dated 17/11/2004 01:48:29 GMT Standard Time, [email protected]_
(mailto:janstr@xxxxxxx) writes: Hi Jud, you wrote:
Jan:
I understand and recognize your lack of time, it's the same with me, and the
rest of us I guess, we never know how much time is left for us here below.
Jud:
Hahahah! Jan, that sounds as if there's an *above* as well as a *below?*
For me there is only the below - for I would certainly feel out of place
*above.* ;-)
Jan:
But in philosophy, I think, historical awareness is and will always remain
of importance, because the basic philosophical questions, f. i. what is being,
what is matter, what is time, who/what is man, what is knowledge, what is
living well? etc., never get old and outdated. What earlier philosophers
thought and said shape the context of our current views, point to further
directions or show us their mistakes and gaps, and also the possible 'hidden'
questions. With regard to the 'hard' sciences, I agree, historical aspects are less
urgent, because development in science is of an eliminative nature, today
nobody will still adhere to Aristotle's cosmology, or Descartes' optica, or the
theory of phlogiston.
Jud:
I agree with all you say here. [except for the *below/above* bit of course.
;-) You are perfectly correct that it is important to add to our knowledge by
the study of the old timers, but my emphasis has always been that of
thinking for myself based upon my own experience, an experience which of course
includes reading the old timers. But some folks [not you] tend to get the
emphasis out of kilter and allow the old timers do their thinking for them, and are
constantly quoting them, [the more the merrier that can be packed onto the
page the better it seems] apparently in the mistaken belief that they are
appealing to some sort of *authority* and in doing so, appear to believe that
others will associate the old timer's authority with them and it will *rub off on
them* in some weird way.
Cut:
THE great divide between the two - although in many cases this separation is
a blurred one.
Jan:
The fact that materialists use or postulate abstractions in their thinking
and experimentations is very much a necessity of their whole endeavor. To make
their discoveries they formulate hypotheses containing some expected
abstract quality or property of certain (un)known phenomena, to test them in
experimental settings. Highly abstract concepts as mass, gravity, energy, light etc.
have guided and informed scientific practices throughout the ages; they were
first rationally guessed and postulated and later empirically confirmed to
exist. A materialist ontology can never do without abstractions, because they
are the life blood of their ongoing conjectures and investigations. The
abstract concepts of today may lead to the newly discovered phenomena of tomorrow.
Jud:
As I have been saying for years, I have no argument with the acknowledgement
and use of abstractions by science or anybody else - as long as they are
RECOGNISED as necessary pretences which are vital for the mensuration,
comparison, identification, delineation and the description of entities and their
behaviour, and are not referred to as entities or quasi-entities in themselves.
The *senses* and *pain* for example are convenient ways of describing and
identifying bodily/biological problems of existential modality, but *pain* and
the *senses* do not actually exist per se. I simply don't believe in these
ancient dualisms. Why on earth do people want to split the human holism up into
two dollops? There is not a scrap of evidence for its existence of *mind* or
*consciousness?* I can identify a conscious human being easily, and I can
also identify a guy who has been knocked down by a bus and is unconscious - but
his *consciousness and his unconsciousness* don't exist - only the guy
exists in this state or that. In my ontology there is no: *me,* as opposed to, or
in contradistinction to the *it* of *my body.*
Yes, *You and I* form a dualism, but *me and my body* and its modalities do
not. For me *pain* doesn't exist - only my painful knee painfully exists as
part of the holism with the painful knee that is me. So IMO the senses do not
exist - only the sensors and the sensorising holism actually exist. There is
no duality between the entity that is in a certain location and its *being
there. * An entity simply exists in a certain place. There can be no individual
*Dasein, * because *being there* is simply the modality of an entity which
happens to be in a certain location which we decide to be identified as *THERE*
rather than *HERE. * In other words *Dasein* cannot be an actual or real
subject - because *Dasein* is not an entity - Dasein is what an individual
entity DOES.
*Dasein* cannot be here, there and everywhere at the same time because (A)
if it DID exist it would be an individual, and (B) an individual can only be in
one place at a time. Nothing can exist as an entitic plurality - it can only
exist as a singularity.
Jud: [earlier]
Materialism is not doctrinal
Jan:
Jud, there are doctrinal transcendentalists as there are doctrinal
materialists, as there are non-doctrinal transcendentalists etc., but these doctrinal
and dogmatic aspects or tendencies lie in the closure and fixedness of their
respective theories. Marx, in a certain sense, was a true dogmatist, for
instance in his denial of the right of private property or because he believed
his theory of historical materialism predicted the only possible way of the
development of the capitalist society.
Jud:
It is impossible to be *non-doctrinal transcendentalist* for it is precisely
these doctrinal and dogmatic aspects or tendencies and cognitive closures
and fixities of belief which are accepted by them as being authoritative. If
they did not accept these doctrines, then they would not be perceived or
classed as *transcendentalists*. Marx it is true was dogmatic, and believed that
property was robbery etc. That position is too extreme for me. I believe that
society should control the amount of property that an individual is allowed to
own, but that to ban all private property would be a disaster.
Jan:
Heidegger certainly is not a dogmatic transcendentalist imo, because his
transcendentalism (i. e. his transcendental questioning) never comes to a
concluding finish, he keeps going on searching, repeating the old questions in a
new light, never satisfied with his provisional answers, always on the way,
trying and reaching for the hidden and the forgotten.
Jud:
For me he represents the arch-dogmatist who took the dogma of *Being* for
granted and unquestioningly. Funny, he also comes across to me as being
hectoring and wooden in his style - I particularly resented his non-questioning of
*Being, * and his treatment of it as a *given. * His thinking appears to me as
being not stripped down enough - as being *crude* and *unsophisticated* and
*corpulent* and *fleshy* and *overblown. * In other words his *Basic
Concepts* are not *basic* at all, and should really be re-named: *Basic Suppositions,
* or *Being and the Cognitive Processes of Ontological Conjecture.*
Jan:
Look at SuZ for instance, at first sight it seems a grand composition aimed
at answering the question of Being, in the being of being-man. Yet he never
finished it, could not finish it, because he discovered that no definite
doctrines or fixed dogmata could shed light on the hidden essence of man as
Dasein. [cf. Das Da-sein als die Wesung der Lichtung des Sichverbergens gehoert zu
diesem Sichverbergen selbst, das als das Er-eignis west. BzP: 297]
Jud:
He could have saved himself a lot of time and hard work by beginning the
book differently. He could have first of all started by asking the question:
*Is *Being* a viable actuality worth questioning as a *problem, * which has
been *forgotten, or is it just a primitive fiction?
The query: *Why do we think there is such a notion as *Being, * how did this
notion come about? Who said that there is such a thing as: *the Question of
*Being* in the first place - and WHY? What was *in it* for him? This sort
of basic questioning is completely absent from the pages of *Being and Time. *
Jan:
You keep coming back on the fact that Heidegger's language and neologisms is
such an outrage, but look at Plato's and Aristotle's most unheard and
'brutal' use of the Greek language [cf. SuZ: 39]
Jud:
They had an excuse - they lived over 2000 years ago and were not privy to
the knowledge we have nowadays. BTW, We are supposed to believe that they were
breaking new ground, which is something I very much doubt, for they inherited
a lot from their predecessors and also their contemporaries. That is not to
disparage them in any way. Later they, [Plato and Aristotle] were both
extremely important to Christianity, which makes one immediately suspicious of them
and their ideas. To be accepted by Christianity is the kiss of death
philosophically. Heidegger's neologisms were for the most part re-jigged and
re-packaged Germanifications of earlier naive neologisms.
Jan:
And also look at the language of our modern physicists, they talk about
quarks, baryons, neutrinos, axions, fotinos, and anti-quarks, anti-baryons etc.
Jud:
These are just nouns to describe entities - nothing mysterious or abstract
involved - just like calling a London bus a *London bus.*
Jan:
Why not grant our philosophers the same freedom, especially when they claim
to enter new ontological territories?
Jud:
Because they have a habit of attributing quasi-actuality to abstractions
where there is no actuality involved, either actual or quasi-actual. One can
call it a harmless and slightly dotty *let's pretend philosophy, * or provide
the harsher version, the one which Rene light-heartedly calls that sort of
thing - *Lies. *
I don't believe for one moment that Heideggerians are deceivers - for me
they are simply misled, and because of that [IMO] they are wasting their
intellectual lives - but some people waste their lives or pass the time in ballroom
dancing or collecting bird's eggs, so who are we to criticise?
Jud {earlier]:
I am, of necessity, generalising of course, but whereas normally a
materialist explains every apparent instance of a mental phenomenon as a feature of
some physical object, my type of nominalist would say that the word *feature*
is a cop-out, and that neither the mental nor the phenomenal exist, but only
the human holism exists.
Jan:
But do you mean to say here that "the human holism" is an entity that
exists, but without any mental capacities and unable to perceive any phenomena?
What then is the human holism made of?
Jud:
You exist as an intelligent mentaliser Jan - but it is the mentalising
[thinking] Jan that exists not Jan's mentalising [thinking.]
Jan blinks his eyes, but the blinking doesn't exist - the blinking Jan
exists in an existential modality of blinking. The human holism, like anything
else in the cosmos, consists of collections of cells, atoms, energo-molecules. I
have many materialist friends who would say for example that: *process*
actually exists, whilst I would claim that only the entities which exist in what
we humans would describe as: *being situated in certain spatial and contiguous
relationships* exist.
Jan:
In what sense does a (spatial and contiguous) relationship exist?
Jud:
Spatial and contiguous relationships do not exist - only the entities which
are localised in spatial positions and which are considered by humans to be
close to, or far from other entities exist. What we consider comprises the
abstractions *close* or *far* is the subject of another discussion.
It is a lot easier to type the six-letter word * Matter* rather than the
longer: *That which has mass and occupies space * or *the actually entitic, * or
*that which exists in the manner of a force field, * etc.
Jan:
Imho you are only substituting the abstraction "matter" with other
abstractions as "mass", "space", "force", "field"; it's a gain, I agree, but not one
in favour of supporting your *eliminative* nominalism, which here seems more
like going in the direction of an accumulative nominalism?
Jud:
You make some good points here Jan. "Matter," mass", "space", "force",
"field"; etc., are all abstractions. The main reason I single out *matter* as an
abstraction is didactic in the sense that I hope to draw people's attention to
a major rift between the materialist and the eliminative nominalist. People
automatically expect extreme nominalists to accept *matter* forgetting that
for a nominalist *matter* is a meaningless universal. As for the rest of them:
"Time, "mass", "space", "force", "field"; I reject all of them as
abstractions. However as long as people are aware that nominalists reject them as
non-entities, then it is perfectly OK for nominalists to use the words as
shortcuts in an elliptical manner. The last thing a eliminative nominalist wants is
to be accused of believing that "Time, "Being," "mass", "space", "force",
"field"; actually EXIST, and that they are anything more than non-existent
constructs of the human mind for benign, [and/or in the case of *Being* malign]
purposes.
Jan:
Of course there is nothing wrong with using abstract shortcuts and
conventions in our conversations, we all do, whether we are nominalists, materialists
or transcendentalists. The question however is: why do we use them? It is
because language is inherently an imperfect medium, or because we as human
beings are imperfect language users, or is it that the world (the reality, the
phenomena) we try to grasp and communicate to each other, is of such a nature
that we necessary need abstractions, because the whole reality where we live in
contains existing abstractions too?
Jud:
More good questions/points. We use them mainly to save time. To say: *I am
going dancing tonight* is a lot shorter than saying:
*I am travelling by car [instead of *going*] to move my body to a musical
accompaniment in a formalised series of movements [dancing] when the earth has
turned away from the sun [tonight] * [It is IMO] nothing to do with language
being *imperfect* or not *developed* enough to describe these activities.
Words such as *reality* are just stand-in words for: *that which is real, * and
the word phenomena* is a short cut or stand in word for: *entities as they
appear to us. * Plainly there is nothing which is not an entity, and only that
which is an entity can be detected by our sensors. The *imagination* is
simply a compendium of memories of pre-sensorialised entities stored in the brain
tissues, drawn upon, manifested and re-jigged in various juxtapositions to
achieve certain effects.
Jan:
I believe and have argued many times before, that what exists in the world
is not ultimately exhausted by nor can be reduced to material or energetic
entities only.
Jud:
Where and what is your evidence for this belief Jan? Can you give me an
example of some phenomenon which cannot be reduced to material or energetic an
entity?
Jan:
Matter and energy are only a part of the world; non-material beings as time,
(empty) space, ideas, words, concepts, emotions, creativity, birth and death
etc. are equally existential and constitutive elements of our world, because
without the existence of these non-material beings we could not sufficiently
explain and understand phenomena as change, difference, becoming,
appearance, illusion etc.
Jud:
The term: *non-material being* doesn't make sense - how can something be a
being if it is not a something? To be a being is to BE something the verb *BE*
is the root of the verb *being* To be a being is to exist in actuality; have
life or reality. The state or quality of having existence, a living entity.
How on earth can things be beings when they are not beings? Where is the
evidence for these *non-beings? * Who was the first person to make these claims
that something that doesn't exist exists, and why do/did people believe him?
[Whoever he was} There is absolutely nothing in what you mention above that
cannot be explained using the eliminativistic nominalist ontology Jan. Ideas,
words, concepts, emotions, creativity are simply existential states and
modalities of ideating, communicating, emotional, creative human entities [holisms].
Birth is just a name we give to the existential act of a female separating
from the individual entity that is her offspring. Death is a change of
existential modality, when a human entity ceases to be in the state that we call
*living. * *Space* is an area that humans designate as being unoccupied by
entities - though this concept is undergoing dramatic change with the theory of
*dark matter* etc. *Time* is the name we give to the interval we humans
perceive to be *between* entitic interactions.
Jan:
One of the weaknesses of nominalism and 'crude' materialism is that when
they are asked to explain the possibility of 'change, difference and novelty'
without the use of non-material beings, they resort to transcendental phenomena
[see f. i. Ockham's omnipotent God; or your transcendental tautology that "X
exists as X"].
Jud:
I personally feel uncomfortable and do not wish to be associated with *crude
materialism. * Whilst I have great respect for Ockham, be was handicapped
with the problem of having to reconcile his theology with his nominalism or
risk being burnt alive at the stake.. I am not handicapped with such
restrictions. If you can prove that an entity doesn't exist in the way it exists then
you will be the new Leonardo de Vinci. As a matter of interest Jan, DO you
contest the fact that entities exist in the way that they exist? As I grab the
coffee mug on my desk THUS - it is obvious to me that it MUST exist in the way
that it exists, and also my hand that grabs it also exists in the way that
it exists. What is *transcendental* about that? If I drop my mug on the floor
and smash it then what remains of it will still exist in the way that it
exists - it will not exist in the way that it formerly existed, and it will not
exist in the way that it will exist next Tuesday will it?
Jud
It is made of wood and graphite.
Jan:
I agree, your pen is made of wood and graphite, but wood and graphite are
still nominalistic materialist abstractions, because wood is made up of
molecules, atoms, particles etc.; there is no rockbottom of material ultimata to
which the 'nomos' of the nominalist could un-ambigiously refer to in any
concrete and definite sense. There are no 'atomistic' words or propositions that
perfectly refer, point to or picture a factual state of the (material) world.
Jud:
More good points. I could create a long and torturous sentence along the
lines of: That entity which I refer to as *my pen* consists of collections of
molecules and force-fields of a type which we humans characterise appertaining
to *wood* and *graphite. * Now nominalists usually try to *keep pace* with
science in the sense of the designations and characterisations of quantum
physics, and though there are new introductions of particulates as more and more
are discovered, most people are willing to accept the more widely known current
ones of molecules, atoms, particles, quarks, protons, neutrons, leptons,
electrons, anti-electrons, neutrinos, tau neutrinos, lambdas, muons, baryons,
mesons, photons, gluons and etc. Presumably it would be possible to provide a
fairly accurate description of the type of wood used in the production of my
pencil and the physical nature of the graphite which provides the *lead* which
makes the marks upon the paper - but what is the point? It is the principle
that counts, and the principle is that any philosopher worth his salt should
make himself aware of the REAL nature of entities and describe then in a way
which is closest to the current understanding of mankind in these matters.
Jan:
As Wittgenstein argued, in his critique on logical atomism and nominalism,
language has no logical depth-structure, which in a *one to one* way would
picture or mirror the (logical) structure of the material world. Words and names
refer to, and derive their meaning from other words and names, language-use
is more like playing a game with various (local, provisional, non logical)
rules; words and sentences relate to each other more like members of a certain
family, to understand the meaning of a word is to see it played out and
placed in a whole of family resemblance's [cf. PU: §64-77].
Jud:
I disagree with Wittgenstein on this matter. His *logical depth structure*
is a meaningless abstraction. If I point to a cat and utter the word *cat*
there is no misunderstanding on your part that I am linking the phonemes K -A -
T with the mewing furry animal before us. If I took you to a remote jungle
clearing in the Amazon rain forest and introduced you to a painted tribesman and
pointed to his blowpipe and pronounced the word *tergat* you would
immediately understand that the blowpipe was known by that word in the language of the
Indian society of which he was a member. You would grasp this message
WITHOUT you previously knowing even one word of his language. You would have NO
NEED to derive the meaning of *tergat* from other words and names used by the
forest-dwellers who spoke that language. The language games that people play
are played with ABSTRACTIONS mostly and hardly ever with proper nouns.
Jan:
Wittgenstein's argument is in fact quite simple. Language he claims has no
logical ground-structure, because words and concepts (i. e. the basic
ingredients of language) can not uniquely be defined in a finite description of
necessary and sufficient conditions. Let's look at some examples: if f. i. we take
the concept "atom" physicists will agree at some provisional definition of
this object, but it is not a fixed definition because it depends on the current
(fallible) state of our theories of physics and on ongoing discoveries we
continually do in our laboratories.
Jud:
OK, but what is wrong with that? It depends on the contextual circumstances
and the implicature involved regarding the conversation is taking place. In a
general discussion amongst the non-scientific, the employment of the word
*atom* would be sufficient to communicate the simple idea of what was being
described. In context, if you told me I consisted of billions of atoms, I would
understand you and concur with your observation without a murmur. At a
conference of physicists to use the word *atom* would not be precise enough, and
they would use other words which better described the area of research with
which they were engaged in discussing. What is wrong with that? When new
molecules are discovered and identified they are given new names, as new stars are
discovered they are given names - this is all good healthy nominalisation -
what's wrong with that? Don't you think that trannies like Wittgenstein are a
bit passé for these days - a bit *old hat?*
Jan:
If we take a look at the word "mind" we see the same problem. How do we use
this word in our everyday conversations? There seem to be infinite ways to
use it in a meaningful sense, f.i. When I say, "I am of two minds", or "he has
a very good mind", or "something slipped my mind" every time I used the word
"mind" in a different meaning.
Jud:
For me it is quite simple - *mind* is a complete nonsense - and abstraction
- it simply doesn't exist. The fact that human beings use such terms and
metaphors and figures of speech as PITS [people on the street] use them, does not
mean that *mind* is magically actualised by such metaphors. The fact that a
millions screaming Moslems or Christians or Hindus or Jews believe that *God*
exists doesn't automatically mean that such an imaginary notion is actually
real, and that which corresponds to the million names for *God* actually
exists FOR REAL.
Jan:
Or take the concept "game", what is a "game”? Can we construct a definition
that conveys all possible games? There are board-games, outdoor games,
collective games, solitary games, games with no winner etc. etc. And also for
something as simple as a chair; can we formulate a conclusive definition of what a
"chair" is?
Jud:
That is just a typical waggish Wittgensteinian time-waster. There is no
problem with this *game* question. YES we CANNOT formulate a conclusive
definition of what a "chair" is [unless like Plato we believe that there is a
definitive draft of such an object floating around in the wild-blue yonder] or of
whatever any other entity in the cosmos is, because it would take the first
million years to describe what one of the upholstery pins was like, and by the
time we were finished we would have to start all over again for it would have
changed. Any observed object changes every millisecond and if you are looking
at a chair and say *chair* the chair is not the same object that it was before
you uttered the word *chair. * It's like a new car - the moment you drive
out of the showroom it becomes *second-hand. * ;-)
In fact the upholstery-pin under observation would be in CONSTANT change, so
it wouldn't even be worth starting to PROPERLY describe it. THEN, due to the
fact that our sensorial equipment is not good enough, our description would
not coincide with the actual way in which the entity was existing. THAT is the
main reason why Husserl's and Heidegger's uploading of the *Being* of
beings, via the mechanism of *object givenness* falls flat on its face - the
process of *object givenness* is basically uploading a load of individualised
ontological crap, and there is no Daseinic universal of the *Being* of a cow. For
millions of individual Daseins on one side of the world it is a stupid animal
only fit for eating, milking and making glue out of, and on the other side
of the world millions of duskier-coloured Daseins worship the ground it walks
upon, and walk behind it picking up its droppings and praying to them as holy
entities.
If I say to you: *Jan, you and I are going to play a game. * I know
perfectly well what the reply is going to be from you: *What kind of game Jud? * If
we are both interested we can identify the kind of game that I have in mind.
*A card game? * OK *what sort of card game? * etc. We have NO NEED, or there
is no COMMUNICATIONAL REQUIREMENT to identify the game in any more detail
than that which is necessary for us both to agree with the nature of the cards
or dice we use, and the rules of the game. As long as there is mutual
agreement on cards and rules we can proceed.
Jan:
A table can be a chair, a box can be a chair, a rock can be a chair, a pile
of books can be a chair, a cow can be a chair (yes, I have seen farmers who
were sitting on a cow when she layed resting in the stable) etc.
Jud:
NO - you are wrong Jan. A table can be used in the manner usually rendered
by a chair, a box can be can be used in the manner usually supplied by a
chair, a rock can be can be used in the manner usually afforded by a chair, a pile
of books can be can be used in the manner usually catered for by a chair, a
cow can be can be used in the manner usually provided by a chair - but you
couldn't sit at a low table on a cow and have lunch in McDonald's. Furthermore,
a chair cannot be used in the manner usually provided by a rock, [you cannot
build the Hoover Dam out of chairs] and a chair cannot be used in the manner
usually provided by a cow, [you cannot milk a chair] and a chair cannot be
used in the manner usually provided by a book, [you cannot read a chair as you
sit on an aeroplane heading for Timbuktu.]
End of Part One.
Regards,
Jud
Personal Website:
_http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/index.htm_
(http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/index.htm)
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