Frederica,
You are absolutely correct about the body-boundary as an epistemic convenience which has been reified into empirical fact for purposes of ontological/metaphysical speculation. This is very much tied in with Kant and Schopenhauer's epistemology (the latter has been adopted by Kastrup). Somewhere along the way, these thinkers adopt a naive realism - they take a merely perceptual experience and assume it is a 'thing-itself'. This contradicts their own philosophy, which is normally very critical of naive realism, but they do it because it is the only way to continue the ontological speculation. Consider the various "fundamental questions" asked by people pursuing metaphysical theories:
- What is the essence of everything we perceive?
- What is the essence of the human individual who perceives?
- What is the purpose of our existence?
- How did we come into being in the distant past and where are we going in the distant future?
- Does God exist and, if so, who or what is he? How is he involved in where we have been and where we are going?
It makes great sense, at this point, to ask, "what is the nature of the faculty we would use to even approach these questions, i.e. what are we capable of knowing?" That is the beginning of epistemology in modern philosophy, and Kant was the first and the last to tackle it among the academic philosophers. Nearly everyone after him, including Schopenhauer, simply adopted his position that we can't know anything of essence through our reasoning. But then how to continue pursuing our trade of academic philosophy? The only way is to become inconsistent and selectively choose what will be treated as mere appearance and what will be given more ontological status (ignoring the fact that one's own epistemology ruled out the possibility of doing the latter).
Thank you, AshvinP for the thorough reply! This seems to be a major opposition to idealism.
So you are saying: they can’t postulate mentation as ontological primitive, because they do this through reasoning after saying that nothing of essence can be known through reasoning. And you want to tackle the nature of reasoning before the nature of reality on the grounds that we can’t begin to tackle the latter without the former, Correct?
Now, I have no idea about IK or AS, however when it comes to BK’s model, I don't find any implicit or explicit postulate that nothing of essence can be known through reasoning. Have you found it? I am not even sure this comes as a deduction in his idealism. Why would he hold such a position? I don't think he does.
My body-boundary critique btw only disputes the particular way BK chooses to explain how the universal mind articulates itself in the multitude of individualized subjects of experience, namely dissociation and the body as its representation. It doesn’t dispute the idealist hypothesis itself. I just would like to see a better way to explain the de-combination of mind-at-large.
Schopenhauer basically does this for bodily and inner perceptions - in this way he concludes that what is "within him" as impulses of will (naively accepting physical body boundaries as real) must be the very essence of the Cosmos, since what is within him (matter) is also spread throughout the Cosmos. This isn't entirely inaccurate, but he has abstracted out the fact that he reasoned his way to this conclusion, and that all acts of knowing require such reasoning. That means human reason is not bound by the Kantian limit and is interwoven with all our conscious experience of the World Content (WC).
Again, I can't comment on AS, however
I would not agree that human reason is interwoven with all conscious experience (whatever conscious means in your use, and even if it means meta-conscious). To me, thought or reasoning, is just one modality of knowing-experiencing. Reasoning, among other phenomena, might be required for practicing academic philosophy but not necessarily for all acts of knowing.
Reasoning (or thought) happens as one phenomenon among other knowing-phenomena (i.e. perceptions & bodily sensations, thoughts, memories & mental images, emotions) that all contribute to spread light onto the ‘big questions of existence’.
What is the nature of this relationship between human reason and the WC? Those who adhere to the naive realism of body-boundary will say all our inner experiences, including thoughts, are contained within this boundary and must model the WC which exists outside the boundary. They may not say this explicitly, but it is presupposed in all of their arguments. It is what gave rise to the Kantian limit in the first place. What does this accomplish? It severs human thinking from the WC so that the latter is considered something pre-existing our thinking, which only comes along later and tries to model it. Armed with this assumption, the modern philosophers can say their conclusions were generated from direct observation of 'facts' which don't include their concepts.
BK does not say or imply that. The body-boundary comes in his model only as a secondary hypothesis that he posits as an explanation of the privacy and relative separation of our individual subjectivity.
Moreover, BK could not be farther away from saying that his conclusions are generated by direct observation of facts. First, reality is experiential or mental, not 'factual', second
there is no such a thing as direct observation of reality in his model. Observation happens in the cockpit, as per the well-known metaphor. What we are capable of perceiving is not reality and its qualities, but merely a survival-convenient re-rendering of reality on the screen of perception.
No severance between human thinking and world content in BK's model either. On the contrary, it is a continuous and reciprocal impingement of mental contents on both sides!
Even though they all reach much different conclusions - idealists, materialists, fundamentalists, etc. - they all claim to have divined these conclusions directly from perception.
Well, no... BK for example claims to have come to his conclusions from experience (which includes thought) and an ontological primitive or postulate: mentation. Mentation being an extension to the whole of reality of our own experiential first person knowing.
They forget how their intellectual thinking was involved in the weaving together of these experiences. If that was understood, then it would become clear why the "atomized human ego" view is a product of their own flawed thinking, not the structure of Reality itself. It does appear that we are each bound within our skin, but that's all it is - mere appearance. When we continue reasoning further, as modern science has done in certain cases, we find that such a boundary is only perceptual and not ontological.
Such a boundary is not ontological in BK's idealism either: everything is mental. No ontological boundary between reality outside and reality inside us.
We are whirlpools in the lake of universal mentation he says.
Such a boundary is only perceptual: BK agrees with that. He says that the human body is what our experiential inner life
looks like to a second observer.
Once that is realized, we naturally come to the reasoned conclusion that we are not perceiving the entire spectrum of reality - that there are aspects of the human organism and the Cosmos at large which are supersensible to intellectual cognition yet still have a critical influence on the dynamics of our experience.
I don't see this vision as irreconcilable with idealism...
But consider the following thought experiment. Imagine an extraterrestrial humanoid life form whose mode of visual recognition was based on the enumeration of the material components that make up particular [manifestations] of general types, rather than on the identification of the general types that are instantiated by particular [manifestations]. Imagine, further, that this alien lands on Earth at a particular location and encounters two dogs: a living dog and a robotic dog. The alien scans the two dogs, catalogues their material constitution for future identification, and returns home. A few years later, the alien returns to Earth to the same location and faces the two dogs it encountered in its first trip. Despite being in the presence of the same two dogs, the alien’s cognitive apparatus is such that he is only able to identify the robotic dog and not the living one. From the alien’s perspective, the living dog of the first trip has faded out of existence, and an entirely different living dog has taken its place. What this admittedly fanciful thought experiment is meant to illustrate is that, if one focuses on matter rather than on form and allows for a sufficiently extended period of time, the stream-like nature of macroscopic organisms becomes perfectly evident. The fact that this does not happen to be easily perceptible to us does not make it any less true or important.
- Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Science (2018)
We could analogize it to the supersensible spectrum of Light. As humanity involuted into more complex and rigid sense-perception, which also allowed for more clear and precise intellectual consciousness, portions of the Light spectrum were veiled from normal waking cognition. We no longer perceive ultraviolet, infrared, etc. with unenhanced physical senses. The same thing goes for Sound frequencies. Where has the ultraviolet spectrum gone? Nowhere. It doesn't exist behind some veil as a 'noumenal Light-in-itself'. It still exists on 'our side' of experience and permeates all of that experience, but is veiled from our current cognitive perception. Nevertheless, it is always influencing our organism in detectable ways. The same can be said of supersensible forces of the soul (perceptions, impulses, feelings) and spirit (thoughts). These reside within us and therefore we must turn our living reasoning activity inwards for genuine Self-knowledge. It is that Self-knowledge - the fear of unknown 'dangers' lurking within the soul - that modern man wants to desperately avoid by conjuring up intellectual dualities and discontinuities, but ignoring these forces within simply gives rise to their outward manifestation in ever-more destructive ways. We should not ignore them but confront them honestly with the Light and Warmth of our spiritual activity.
We, however, are not prisoners. No traps or snares have been set around us, and there is nothing that should frighten or upset us. We have been put into life as into the element we most accord with, and we have, moreover, through thousands of years of adaptation, come to resemble this life so greatly that when we hold still, through a fortunate mimicry we can hardly be differentiated from everything around us. We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors; if it has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience. How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.
- Rainier Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
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