ScottRoberts wrote: ↑Wed Nov 24, 2021 12:55 amFirst, I do not consider ideas static, but that's another discussion.JeffreyW wrote: ↑Tue Nov 23, 2021 11:04 pm It isn’t a matter of taking “behind” literally, but noting its structural role impeding a real understanding of that time. It is difficult to avoid using metaphysical concepts because it is so hard for us to think without them; and when we slip up we project our habits of thought onto a time when they didn’t exist, and thus block our own view. There was no metaphysical “behind” to nature; everything that existed was visible. You commit that error when you claim the people of that time perceived logos in nature. Rather, logos occurred when nature revealed itself in experience. Logos was man’s apprehension, not something hidden by or behind nature and certainly nothing as static as an idea.
Indeed it is, and I will take up that part of the argument, since it seems to be the common misconception between everyone here, myself included, because even if I don't intellectually consider ideas "static", I know that is how I experience them often. It's very easy to snap back into that mode of abstract thinking about "idea" and I am sure Scott would agree, which is why we are naive materialists and dualists today.
JW,
I have mentioned this to you a few times before, in the context of Schopenhauer's quote - "Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world."
This is why I also directed you to Cleric's imaginative exercise on the other thread. One must come to experience the way in which "idea" can come to life in our immanent experience. Most people experience this when they contemplate aesthetics, even superficially, but they don't bring that knowledge to conscious awareness because there is a deeply ingrained prejudice against Idea. This is why Schopenahuer could write the above quote and still fail to see how his rejection of Idea as noumenon was nothing more than a limit of his own field of vision. I think Hegel had a more living understanding of Idea, but unfortunately it is buried under mountains of abstractions for the most part.
I think I already shared the anecdote of Goethe and Schiller here, where Goethe drew the archetypal proto-plant. Schiller responded, "yes but that is just an idea, not an empirical observation", and Goethe responded, "if that is an idea, then I see ideas with my eyes!" This is actually a very common experience among the most brilliant artists of the modern age. Beethoven expressed similar sentiments - “Music is the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend.” And that's coming from someone who went deaf, so clearly he is not simply talking about the musical sounds by themselves, but the ideal element standing behind those sounds which the listener is transported within. But without any possibility of fully conscious imaginative cognition, since it had not yet blossomed, many thinkers were forced to conclude "mankind cannot comprehend" these higher worlds of knowledge.
Until we come to terms with the fact that what we naively and abstractly think of as "idea" is nothing more than our own limited cognitive vision, a limit which we now have the ability to consciously overcome, we will forever remain within the domain of abstract metaphysics, even if we think we have escaped it. Without the underlying ideal element, understood in its full and living richness, what we claim to know, or whatever we claim it is possible to know, such as "esthetic knowledge", will just be yet another abstraction among a heap of abstractions such as "mind", "matter", "energy", "substance", "process", "emptiness", so on and so forth. It is the Idea which gives any of these "ontological primitives" their meaning in the first place. I don't remember posting my favorite Bergson quote on this thread yet, so I will post it below for your consideration.
Bergson wrote:These conclusions on the subject of duration were, as it seemed to me, decisive. Step by step they led me to raise intuition to the level of a philosophical method. “Intuition,” however, is a word whose use caused me some degree of hesitation. Of all the terms which designate a mode of knowing, it is still the most appropriate; and yet it leads to a certain confusion. Because a Schelling, a Schopenhauer and others have already called upon intuition, because they have more or less set up intuition in opposition to intelligence, one might think that I was using the same method. But of course, their intuition was an immediate search for the eternal! Whereas, on the contrary, for me it was a question, above all, of finding true duration. Numerous are the philosophers who have felt how powerless conceptual thought is to reach the core of the mind. Numerous, consequently, are those who have spoken of a supra-intellectual faculty of intuition.
But as they believed that the intelligence worked within time, they have concluded that to go beyond the intelligence consisted in getting outside of time. They did not see that intellectualized time is space, that the intelligence works upon the phantom of duration, not on duration itself, that the elimination of time is the habitual, normal, commonplace act of our understanding, that the relativity of our knowledge of the mind is a direct result of this fact, and that hence, to pass from intellection to vision, from the relative to the absolute, is not a question of getting outside of time (we are already there); on the contrary, one must get back into duration and recapture reality in the very mobility which is its essence. An intuition, which claims to project itself with one bound into the eternal, limits itself to the intellectual. For the concepts which the intelligence furnishes, the intuition simply substitutes one single concept which includes them all and which consequently is always the same, by whatever name it is called: Substance, Ego, Idea, Will.
Philosophy, thus understood, necessarily pantheistic, will have no difficulty in explaining everything deductively, since it will have been given beforehand, in a principle which is the concept of concepts, all the real and all the possible. But this explanation will be vague and hypothetical, this unity will be artificial, and this philosophy would apply equally well to a very different world from our own. How much more instructive would be a truly intuitive metaphysics, which would follow the undulations of the real! True, it would not embrace in a single sweep the totality of things; but for each thing it would give an explanation which would fit it exactly, and it alone. It would not begin by defining or describing the systematic unity of the world: who knows if the world is actually one?
Experience alone can say, and unity, if it exists, will appear at the end of the search as a result; it is impossible to posit it at the start as a principle. Furthermore, it will be a rich, full unity, the unity of a continuity, the unity of our reality, and not that abstract and empty unity, which has come from one supreme generalization, and which could just as well be that of any possible world whatsoever. It is true that philosophy then will demand a new effort for each new problem. No solution will be geometrically deduced from another. No important truth will be achieved by the prolongation of an already acquired truth. We shall have to give up crowding universal science potentially into one principle.
- Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics (1946)