Res Ipsa Loquitur: Kant vs. the World

[JustinG]

Good post. The world of phenomenon not being other than the world of noumenon brings to mind the plane of immanence of Deleuze (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plane_of_immanence), in which spirit/matter, transcendence/immanence, appearance/reality and noumenon/phenomenon dualisms do not apply. All experience, from the most mundane everyday experience to the most ecstatic mystical experiences, occurs on this plane.

[AshvinP]

What you are doing is even worse (not ethically, but metaphysically). It would be more consistent/coherent with a general idealism, even if not with our experience, to claim no forms whatsoever exist ontically. You are claiming forms do exist ontically, but the idea-form is the one exception that is actually emergent.

I'm repeating again: I never made any claims about the "ontic" existence of anything, the only ting I said was:

But if we take the Buddha's position, he never actually drew such assumptions, he only stated the plain experiential fact of non-conditioned and non-emerging property of awareness and differentiated it from the experiential fact of the ever-changing property of forms.

It necessitates an ontic-epistemic dualism because now there are two categories of forms which are treated differently. Then we have to explain how awareness and non-idea forms give rise to idea-forms and how/why they interact with each other. We have to explain why there are idea-forms when they are altogether unnecessary to ontic non-ideational awareness.

We can try to explain it, but we don't have to.
But, as I said, distinguishing between the content of thoughts and the rest of the forms and whatever there is to the reality is the only way I can see to avoid a mess of not being able to distinguish our ideas and imaginations (Santa clauses, material objects, turtles holding the world, gods and fairies) from reality.

Another possible way to avoid this mess is to pose that some ideas are "true" in an absolute sense and some other ideas are "wrong", claiming the existence of absolute truthfulness criteria. This is basically what Platonism does. But such position equally brings an ontic-epistemic dualism between the "true" and "false" ideas. Some kind of dualism is inevitable here as soon as we attempt to distinguish between accurate and inaccurate representations of reality with ideas: we either (at least epistemologically) distinguish all ideas from the rest of reality, or we distinguish "true" ideas from "false" ones relying on the existence of some absolute criteria of truthfulness (arguably claiming their "ontic" status). In the latter case we would also need to explain where such criteria of truthfulness came from. Well, the theistic version of idealism always has a simple answer to all such metaphysical questions: God made them this way. Anyway, regardless whether such absolute criteria exist or not, humanity was not able to find any of them yet as a result of the millennia of development in philosophy, science and spirituality.

Claiming some phenomenon is "emergent" means it does not exist ontically. Humanity's inability to determine something with certainty in the past is completely irrelevant to the arguments. Claiming there is a "accurate-inaccurate" distinction for ideas is not at all the same as the dualism of positing two essentially different categories of forms (non-emergent forms and emergent idea-forms). And finally, you do know another way of distinguishing accurate ideas from inaccurate ones - it's called the scientific method.

If our worldviews are all a matter of preferences and faith which are empirically untestable, then there is no reason to have any of these discussions on the metaphysics forum. But we are all here because we know it is not that. That knowledge does not require "absolute criteria" for truth or Platonic realm of eternal abstract forms, it only requires one ideal content-relationship which cannot be denied and a willingness to follow our intuition-thinking without assuming a priori self-imposed obstacles.

[Eugene I]

It only requires one ideal content-relationship which cannot be denied and a willingness to follow our intuition-thinking without assuming a priori self-imposed obstacles.

It only requires unprovable, unverifiable and unfalsifiable faith in the existence of "one ideal content-relationship which cannot be denied" once you establish such faith. And our "intuition thinking" has proven to be wrong a countless number of times in the history.

And finally, you do know another way of distinguishing accurate ideas from inaccurate ones - it's called the scientific method.

Such method can only distinguish between more and less accurate ideal models of the patterns of conscious phenomena (in other words, of what the reality looks like phenomenally and what it "does", but not what it actually is).

If our worldviews are all a matter of preferences and faith which are empirically untestable, then there is no reason to have any of these discussions on the metaphysics forum.

That's right, there is no reason other than just curiosity about such possible worldviews, and I don't see anything wrong with such curiosity.

[Eugene I]

Claiming there is a "accurate-inaccurate" distinction for ideas is not at all the same as the dualism of positing two essentially different categories of forms (non-emergent forms and emergent idea-forms). And finally, you do know another way of distinguishing accurate ideas from inaccurate ones - it's called the scientific method.

Let's take two ideas:
"Santa Claus exists"
"Santa Claus does not exist"
So you are saying that both such ideas are equally "ontic", non-emergent and "real"?
If not, which one of them is ("ontic", non-emergent or "real") and which one is not?
And how to distinguish between them? A child's intuition and faith tells him that the former is true and the adult's intuition tells him that the latter is true.

Or take the geocentric and solar-centric astronomical models. The intuition of the best Christian theologists told them that the former is true. Copernicus intuition told him that the latter is true. Einstein's intuition told him that neither is true. And the intuition of most modern physicists tell them that the Einstein's intuition will eventually proven to be not true.

[AshvinP]

It only requires one ideal content-relationship which cannot be denied and a willingness to follow our intuition-thinking without assuming a priori self-imposed obstacles.

It only requires unprovable, unverifiable and unfalsifiable faith in the existence of "one ideal content-relationship which cannot be denied" once you establish such faith. And our "intuition thinking" has proven to be wrong a countless number of times in the history.

And finally, you do know another way of distinguishing accurate ideas from inaccurate ones - it's called the scientific method.

Such method can only distinguish between more and less accurate ideal models of the patterns of conscious phenomena (in other words, of what the reality looks like phenomenally and what it "does", but not what it actually is).

If our worldviews are all a matter of preferences and faith which are empirically untestable, then there is no reason to have any of these discussions on the metaphysics forum.

That's right, there is no reason other than just curiosity about such possible worldviews, and I don't see anything wrong with such curiosity.

I really don't understand how you fail to see the connection to nihilism here. You are asking us to deny the possibility of knowing anything other than we are aware, which is already thinking about your direct experience of awareness i.e. ascribing ideal meaning to that experience, as Cleric pointed out, and also to accept that all of our aims in life are 'mere curiosity'. That humanity endures all manner of suffering and malevolence to make room for mere curiosity. That, as far as we know, there is no difference between what mere curiosity looks like and does and what real purpose looks like and does. You are not only creating metaphysical problems for yourself as much as the materialist who confronts the hard problem, but also attempting to make everyone question their intuitive-experiential-thoughtful meanings in the process. Because incomplete knowledge for you = no knowledge whatsoever. Next post I write is going to be "Eugene vs. the World" because your epistemic view is even more hopeless than Kant's!

[AshvinP]

Claiming there is a "accurate-inaccurate" distinction for ideas is not at all the same as the dualism of positing two essentially different categories of forms (non-emergent forms and emergent idea-forms). And finally, you do know another way of distinguishing accurate ideas from inaccurate ones - it's called the scientific method.

Let's take two ideas:
"Santa Claus exists"
"Santa Claus does not exist"
So you are saying that both such ideas are equally "ontic", non-emergent and "real"?
If not, which one of them is ("ontic", non-emergent or "real") and which one is not?
And how to distinguish between them? A child's intuition and faith tells him that the former is true and the adult's intuition tells him that the latter is true.

Or take the geocentric and solar-centric astronomical models. The intuition of the best Christian theologists told them that the former is true. Copernicus intuition told him that the latter is true. Einstein's intuition told him that neither is true. And the intuition of most modern physicists tell them that the Einstein's intuition will eventually proven to be not true.

The ideas themselves are both ontic i.e. non-emergent because ideal content-activity is ontic under idealism by definition. If we are not assuming any philosophical axioms, then our direct experience also suggests ideal content-activity is ontic along with willing-feeling. Whether that ideal content is useful in 'saving the appearances' and restoring higher order unities of ideal relations is a question for spiritual science to investigate. The evolution of scientific paradigms you reference is exactly how the unconcealment of knowledge unfolds. That is not just philosophical or spiritual speculation but empirically verified results of developmental psychology. It is only a problem when anyone mistakes their particular model for the final and complete model.

[Cleric K]

The ideas can result from experience, relate to experience, reflect it, point to it, describe it. But they are never "equivalent" to the experience itself and can never fully embrace it. This observation comes as a direct result of my meditation experience when I compare the direct conscious experiences and my ideas about them. You are right that the ideas themselves are part of the experience and part of the noumenon, they constitute the "content" of the thoughts, and the thoughts are inseparable part of the direct conscious experience and of the noumenon. Yet, the ideas only constitute a part of the fullness of the experience, a "reflective" part of it. And they can also reflect the experience more or less precisely (or even entirely imprecisely), and can easily mis-represent it.
...
That is what we do in meditation: decipher between the direct pre-thinking reality of conscious experience and the ideas that are contents of thoughts (with thought being also part of the direct experience). By turning on and off the thinking we can experience the pre-thinking reality and then see what thinking does and adds to it. In this way we do not deny thinking, but understand the proper role for it and learn not to be fooled by its content, but experience it for what it actually is: just thinking carrying all sorts of ideas. Once we become free from being fooled (and enslaved) by thinking, we can then fully use it to the best of its ability and appreciate its power and beauty.

The real epistemological question is how and in which way our ideas relate to the reality, to the noumenon? What can we know about noumenon with our ideas in addition to what we can know from the direct conscious experience of it? We should approach this carefully knowing from our previous experience and history of science and philosophy and our private lives how many times thinking fooled and deceived us.

Let's focus entirely on the direct experience. What exactly this experience really gives us and what we add out of ourselves? It is precisely here that we should be most careful and learn from previous experience.

So what's the experience? Pure awareness with phenomena entering and leaving consciousness. That's it. That's as factual as we can be without coloring the facts in any way. But when we say "phenomena, such as thinking and ideas, are only emergent elements from the ground awareness" we have a perfect example of something that we add through thinking to the given. This is the crux of the error. When there's general undervaluing of thinking we simply don't observe it close enough and that's the easiest way to blind ourselves about the way we reach our ideas. The above is such an example. Just because we clothe our knowing activity in a shroud of mystery we imagine that we arrive at the idea of emergence in some more 'direct' way. We contemplate that idea and believe that it's immune to logical fallacies, that it somehow proceeds directly from experience. But it's not so. We simply need to be brutally honest (as you say) with ourselves about this.

To put it into a more simple example, I can say: "When I close my eyes all colors disappear and I'm left in blackness. This direct experience shows me that blackness is fundamental and colors are only emergent phenomena." Put in this way things are much more blatant. Yes, we can fantasize as much as we want about blackness being the pure potential containing everything but the fact remains that we don't experience how exactly colors emerge from it. It's just an abstract conjecture. Direct experience only tells us that color experiences can appear and disappear from consciousness - nothing more. It's practically the same with the mystical state.

If the above is understood properly we'll also be in position to awaken from the Kantian spell that ideas have only local to our conscious bubble existence and can never be anything more than ideal copies of reality. Even though this view is very deeply embedded in the collective subconsciousness we can still recognize it and ask "is it really the result of direct experience? Or it's just an idea that has been spread over the world of perceptions?" If we are brutally honest we'll have to admit that there's nothing in the given that forces us into the conclusion that ideas exist only as personal copies. The whole idea of the personal and separate conscious space (that we discussed in the other thread) is another conjecture of the same kind. All we ever experience is one conscious space and one kind of ideas. When we imagine that our conscious space is only one of many and our ideas are only local to that space, we're presenting an idea as if it proceeds from some certain knowledge. But direct experiences - even in the mystical state - in no way lead out of themselves to these ideas. We only add them half-consciously because we don't pay close attention to our cognitive process.

Anyway. Things won't be resolved by philosophizing at the borderline. We need to see what the practical implications of each view are. That's the only thing that gives ideas their worth. Ideas don't come with labels 'true' or 'false'. They prove their correctness only when they are harmoniously related in greater wholenesses, which become practical and fruitful impulses for individual and social life.
I'm preparing an essay that I hope I'll post in the coming days, which is related to the questions here.

[Shaibei]

Einstein appreciated Spinoza because the method he was trying to establish is scientific. When Steiner's friend, Hugo Bergman, brought Einstein to Steiner's lecture, Einstein did not understand what Bergman wanted. The scientist Einstein could not have had a common language with the mystic Steiner and his supersensible worlds. There may be some who will compare Einstein's discovery of the relativity of time with Kant. Others may come and use Kant to explain the strangeness and probabilities of quantum mechanics. I'm not versed in physics enough to have an opinion on the subject, nor am I sure it's entirely accurate considering Kant relied on Newton's physics.
What I learn from Steiner's story is that when someone comes and confidently declares that he sees the objectivity of reality, take a step back and adopt a degree of caution. Because when it comes to understanding history he was clearly blind

[AshvinP]

Good post. The world of phenomenon not being other than the world of noumenon brings to mind the plane of immanence of Deleuze (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plane_of_immanence), in which spirit/matter, transcendence/immanence, appearance/reality and noumenon/phenomenon dualisms do not apply. All experience, from the most mundane everyday experience to the most ecstatic mystical experiences, occurs on this plane.

Thanks!

"Here, there are no longer any forms or developments of forms; nor are there subjects or the formation of subjects. There is no structure, any more than there is genesis."

(Wiki) In this sense, Hegel’s Spirit (Geist) which experiences a self-alienation and eventual reconciliation with itself via its own linear dialectic through a material history becomes irreconcilable with pure immanence as it depends precisely on a pre-established form or order, namely Spirit itself."

Although I know nothing of Deleuze's philosophy, my first impression is that it is similar to the maneuver Schopenhauer makes. Deny the reality of all forms and collapse everything into Will (immanence). Therefore it only focuses on the pole of formlessness and "overcomes" the various philosophical problems of materialism-idealism-dualism, including Kant's divide, by smearing out all ideal content into pure abstraction. For Goethe and Steiner, in contrast, the formative Spirit is undeniably real and the reason we have so many philosophical problems when considering it is our self-imposed habits of mind. We have no trust that our capacity for thinking-knowing can expand to encompass the phenomenal distinctions from higher, more unified perspectives, so we refuse to even try.

[AshvinP]

Einstein appreciated Spinoza because the method he was trying to establish is scientific. When Steiner's friend, Hugo Bergman, brought Einstein to Steiner's lecture, Einstein did not understand what Bergman wanted. The scientist Einstein could not have had a common language with the mystic Steiner and his supersensible worlds. There may be some who will compare Einstein's discovery of the relativity of time with Kant. Others may come and use Kant to explain the strangeness and probabilities of quantum mechanics. I'm not versed in physics enough to have an opinion on the subject, nor am I sure it's entirely accurate considering Kant relied on Newton's physics.
What I learn from Steiner's story is that when someone comes and confidently declares that he sees the objectivity of reality, take a step back and adopt a degree of caution. Because when it comes to understanding history he was clearly blind

To be clear, in the original post, I was not trying to establish a reliance of Kant on Einstein but the other way around (obviously due to the temporal difference), and not really a "reliance" but just an interesting speculative connection between Kantian divide and the discovery of physical black holes. I also think the Kantian influence on physicalist science in general is very clear. As for Steiner, perhaps Einstein would have appreciated him more if he had engaged with Steiner's rigorous philosophical works first. In Goethean Science, Steiner elaborates on the connection between Goethe and Spinoza:

And [Goethe] looked into the philosophers in order also to bring clearly to consciousness for himself what he was, in order also to know what lay in him as living activity. He sought in them an explanation and validation of his own being. That is his relationship to the philosophers. To this end, he studies Spinoza in his youth and entered later into scientific discourse with his philosophical contemporaries. In his early years, Spinoza and Giordano Bruno seemed to the poet to best express his own nature.
...
Even for expressing this conviction he found a formulation in Bruno: “For, just as we do not recognize colours and sounds with one and the same sense, so also we do not recognize the substratum of the arts and that of nature with one and the same eye,” because we “see the first with the physical eye and the second with the eye of reason.” And with Spinoza it is no different. Spinoza's teachings are indeed based on the fact that the divinity has merged with the world. Human knowing can therefore aim only to penetrate into the world in order to know God. Any other way of arriving at God must seem impossible to anyone thinking consistently according to Spinoza's way of thinking. For God has given up all existence of His own; outside the world He exists nowhere. But we must seek Him where He is.

Any actual knowing must therefore be of such a kind that, in every piece of world knowledge, it conveys to us a piece of divine knowledge. Knowing, at its highest level, is therefore a coming together with the divinity. There we call it knowing in beholding (anschauliches Wissen). We know things “sub specie æternitatis,” that is, as flowing from the divinity. The laws that our spirit recognizes in nature are therefore God in His very being; they are not only made by Him. What we recognize as logical necessity is so because the being of the divinity, i.e., the eternal lawfulness, dwells within it. That was a view which is in accordance with the Goethean spirit.

His own firm belief that nature, in all its doings, reveals something divine to us lay before him in Spinoza's writings in the clearest statements. “I am holding firmly and ever more firmly to the atheist's (Spinoza) way of revering God,” he writes to Jacobi when the latter wanted to put the teachings of Spinoza in another light. Therein lies the relatedness of Goethe to Spinoza. And it indicates a superficial judgment of the matter when, with respect to this deep inner harmony between Goethe's nature and Spinoza's teachings, one ever and again emphasizes something purely external by saying that Goethe was drawn to Spinoza because he, like Spinoza, would not tolerate a final cause in explaining the world. The fact that Goethe, like Spinoza, rejected final causes was only one result of their views.

But let us put the theory of final causes clearly before us. A thing is explained, in its existence and nature, by the fact that one demonstrates its necessity for something else. One shows that this thing is of such and such a nature because that other thing is like this or that. This presupposes that a world ground exists which stands over and above both beings and arranges them in such a way that they match each other. But if the world ground is inherent in every single thing, then this kind of explanation makes no sense.

For then the nature of a thing must appear to us as the result of the principle at work within it. We will seek, within the nature of a thing, the reason why it is as it is and not different than it is. If we hold the belief that something divine is inherent in each thing, then it will not in fact occur to us to seek to explain its lawfulness by any outer principle. The relationship of Goethe to Spinoza should also not be grasped in any other way than that he found in Spinoza the formulations, the scientific language, for expressing the world lying within him.